Parisians in the Country | Page 2

would assert Balzac's absolute infallibility as a gynaecologist to give me a reasoned criticism of the heroine of this novel. I do not entirely "figure to myself" Dinah de la Baudraye. It is perfectly possible that she should have loved a "sweep" like Lousteau, there is certainly nothing extremely unusual in a woman loving worse sweeps even than he. But would she have done it, and having done it, have also done what she did afterwards? These questions may be answered differently; I do not answer them in the negative myself, but I cannot give them an affirmative answer with the conviction which I should like to show.
Among the minor characters, the /substitut/ de Clagny has a touch of nobility which contrasts happily enough with Lousteau's unworthiness. Bianchon is as good as usual; Balzac always gives Bianchon a favorable part. Madame Piedefer is one of the numerous instances in which the unfortunate class of mothers-in-law atones for what are supposed to be its crimes against the human race; and old La Baudraye, not so hopelessly repulsive in a French as he would be in an English novel, is a shrewd old rascal enough.
But I cannot think the scene of the Parisians /blaguing/ the Sancerrois is a very happy one. That it is in exceedingly bad taste might not matter so very much; Balzac would reply, and justly, that he had not intended to represent it as anything else. That the fun is not very funny may be a matter of definition and appreciation. But what scarcely admits of denial or discussion is that it is tyrannously too long. The citations of /Olympia/ are pushed beyond measure, beyond what is comic, almost beyond the license of farce; and the comments, which remind one rather of the heavy jesting on critics in /Un Prince de la Boheme/ and the short-lived /Revue Parisienne/, are labored to the last degree. The part of Nathan, too, is difficult to appreciate exactly, and altogether the book does not seem to me a /reussite/.
The history of /L'Illustre Gaudissart/ is, for a story of Balzac's, almost null. It was inserted without any previous newspaper appearance in the first edition of /Scenes de la Vie de Province/ in 1833, and entered with the rest of them into the first edition also of the /Comedie/, when the joint title, which it has kept since and shared with /La Muse du Departement/, of /Les Parisiens en Province/ was given to it.
/La Muse du Departement/ has a rather more complicated record than its companion piece in /Les Parisiens en Province/, L'Illustre Gaudissart/. It appeared at first, not quite complete and under the title of /Dinah Piedefer/, in /Le Messager/ during March and April 1843, and was almost immediately published as a book, with works of other writers, under the general title of /Les Mysteres de Province/, and accompanied by some other work of its own author's. It had four parts and fifty-two chapters in /Le Messager/, an arrangement which was but slightly altered in the volume form. M. de Lovenjoul gives some curious indications of mosaic work in it, and some fragments which do not now appear in the text.
George Saintsbury

I

THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART
By HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Madame la Duchesse de Castries.

THE ILLUSTRIOUS GAUDISSART


CHAPTER I
The commercial traveller, a personage unknown to antiquity, is one of the striking figures created by the manners and customs of our present epoch. May he not, in some conceivable order of things, be destined to mark for coming philosophers the great transition which welds a period of material enterprise to the period of intellectual strength? Our century will bind the realm of isolated power, abounding as it does in creative genius, to the realm of universal but levelling might; equalizing all products, spreading them broadcast among the masses, and being itself controlled by the principle of unity,--the final expression of all societies. Do we not find the dead level of barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of the world in one direction?
The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast among the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human pyrotechnic is a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he expounds all the better for his want of faith. Curious being! He has seen everything, known everything, and is up in all the ways of the world. Soaked in the vices of Paris, he affects to be the fellow-well- met of