SAINTE-BEUVE AND BALZAC
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said. But suppose we take a prostitute who has read Balzac and who,
in some place where she is unknown, feels a genuine love which
is
returned; or go further, take a man who has a scoundrely past, or
a bad name in politics, for instance, and who in some place where
he is unknown makes delightful friendships, gathers a pleasant circle
about him, reflects that when, as soon as they will, these people
begin to find out who he is, they may tum away from him, and
casts about for some means to avert the storm. Driving alone through
the lanes of that holiday landscape which he will go away from,
and where disagreeable stories about him will soon be current, he
escorts an uneasy melancholy that is not without its charms, because
he has read
Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan,
he knows he
is a participant in a situation which is in some way literary and derives
a certain beauty from this. While the carriage bears him through
the autumnal lanes toward friends who still trust him, his uneasiness
is tempered by a charm which would not possess the sadness of
love if there were no such thing as poetry.
If
the crimes attributed
to him are only imaginary, he has even more reason to count the
hours until his cronies d'Arthez, de Rastignac and de Marsay are
dragged through the mire. The truth of Balzac's situations-a truth
somehow contingent and personal, so that one remembers so many
of the situations in terms of those who take part in them, as for in–
stance, that of Rastignac marrying the daughter of his mistress Del–
phine de Nucingen, or Lucien arrested on the eve of
his
marriage
with Mlle. de Grandlieu, or Vautrin inheriting from Lucien de Ru–
bernpre whose fortune he had tried to make, like the Lantys' fortune,
founded on a cardinal's love for a eunuch, the little old man to whom
all pay their respects-such truth is here striking. And there are
those subtle truths, gathered from the surface of fashionable life and
all with enough general applicability for one to be able to say long
afterwards: How true that is! And there are truths that go deeper,
like Paquita Valdes loving precisely the man who resembles the
woman she lives with; like Vautrin keeping the woman who can see
his son, Sallenauve, every day; like Sallenauve marrying the daughter
of Mme. de l'Estorade. There, beneath the patent external action
of the plot, run the mysterious laws of feeling and of flesh and blood.
The only thing that is rather worrying about this interpretation
of his works is that these are just the things he never mentions
in
