PARTISAN REVIEW
191
it vice, sorrow, greed? Had she loved too much,
been
a go-between
or simply a courtesan? Was she expiating the triumphs of an in–
solent youth? .." (II, 855). Reality is both the scene of drama for
Balzac, and mask of the true drama, which lies behind,
is
mysterious,
and can only be alluded to, questioned, then gradually elucidated.
His drama is
of
the true, wrested from the real; the streets and walls
of Paris under pressure of the narrator's insistence become the ele–
ments of a Dantesque vision, leading the reader into infernal circles:
"as step by step daylight fades and the song of the guide goes hollow
when the visitor descends into the Catacombs."
The same process may be observed in Balzac's dramatizations
of human encounters: they tend toward intense, excessive representa–
tions of life which strip the facade of manners to reveal the essential
conflicts at work, moments of symbolic confrontation which fully
articulate the terms of the drama. In
Gobseck,
for instance, the sinning
Comtesse de Restaud, struggling to preserve her fortune for her two
illegitimate children, is caught in the act of trying to wrest her
husband's secrets from the oldest son (the legitimate one) when
the Count rises from
his
deathbed:
"Ah!" cried the Count, who had opened the door and appeared
suddenly, almost naked, already as dried and shrivelled as a skele–
ton . . . "You watered my life with sorrows, and now you would
trouble my death, pervert the mind of my son, tum him into a
vicious person," he cried in a rasping voice.
The Countess threw herself at the feet of this dying man whom
the last emotions of life made almost hideous and poured out her
tears.
"Pardon, pardon!" she cried.
"Had you any pity for me?" he asked. "I let you devour your for–
tune, now you want to devour mine, and ruin my son."
"All right, yes, no pity for me, be inflexible," she said. "But the
children! Condemn your wife to live in a convent, I will obey; to
expiate my faults toward you I will do all you command; but let
the children live happily!
Dh,
the children, the children!"
"I have only one child," answered the Count stretching in a ges–
ture of despair his shrivelled arm toward his son. [II, 665]
