Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A - Z | Page 6

He fathomed
every complication of heart and mind in the modern woman by an
intuition of the laws which control her development. He divined the
transformation in the lives of artists, keeping pace with the change in
the national situation; and to this day the picture he has drawn of
journalism in Lost Illusions ("A Distinguished Provincial at Paris")
remains strictly true. It seems to me that this same power of locating
causes, which has brought about such a wealth of ideas in his work, has
also brought about the magic of it all. While other novelists describe
humanity from the outside, he has shown man to us both from within
and without. The characters which crowd forth from his brain are
sustained and impelled by the same social waves which sustain and
impel us. The generative facts which created them are the same which
are always in operation about us. If many young men have taken as a
model a Rastignac, for instance, it is because the passions by which this
ambitious pauper was consumed are the same which our age of
unbridled greed multiplies around disinherited youth. Add to this that
Balzac was not content merely to display the fruitful sources of a
modern intellect, but that he cast upon them the glare of the most ardent
imagination the world has ever known. By a rare combination this
philosopher was also a man, like the story-tellers of the Orient, to
whom solitude and the over-excitement of night-work had
communicated a brilliant and unbroken hallucination. He was able to
impart this fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of
Arabian Nights country, where all the passions, all the desires of real
life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the dreams
brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not
understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of Balzac's is
more real than the actual world, and that they devoted their energies to
imitating it?
It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that
Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating
influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he
defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the
oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive influences.
It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central portions of the

nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread the Comedie
Humaine. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr and
Christophe for this Repertory. Thanks to them, we shall the more easily
traverse the long galleries, painted and frescoed, of this enormous
palace,--a palace still unfinished, inasmuch as it lacks those Scenes of
Military Life whose titles awaken dreams within us: Forced Marches;
The Battle of Austerlitz; After Dresden. Incontestably, Tolstoy's War
and Peace is an admirable book, but how can we help regretting the
loss of the painting of the Grand Army and of our Great Emperor, by
Balzac, our Napoleon of letters?
PAUL BOURGET.

REPERTORY OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE

A
ABRAMKO, Polish Jew of gigantic strength, thoroughly devoted to the
broker, Elie Magus, whose porter he was, and whose daughter and
treasures he guarded with the aid of three fierce dogs, in 1844, in a old
house on the Minimes road hard by the Palais Royale, Paris. Abramko
had allowed himself to be compromised in the Polish insurrection and
Magus was interested in saving him. [Cousin Pons.]
ADELE, sturdy, good-hearted Briarde servant of Denis Rogron and his
sister, Sylvie, from 1824 to 1827 at Provins. Contrary to her employers,
she displayed much sympathy and pity for their youthful cousin,
Pierrette Lorrain. [Pierrette.]
ADELE, chambermaid of Madame du Val-Noble at the time when the
latter was maintained so magnificently by the stockbroker, Jacques
Falleix, who failed in 1929. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.]
ADOLPHE, slight, blonde young man employed at the shop of the
shawl merchant, Fritot, in the Bourse quarter, Paris, at the time of the

reign of Louis Philippe. [Gaudissart II.]
ADOLPHUS, head of the banking firm of Adolphus & Company of
Manheim, and father of the Baroness Wilhelmine d'Aldrigger. [The
Firm of Nucingen.]
AGATHE (Sister), nee Langeais, nun of the convent of Chelles, and,
with her sister Martha and the Abbe de Marolles, a refugee under the
Terror in a poor house of the Faubourg Saint-Martin, Paris. [An
Episode Under the Terror.]
AIGLEMONT (General, Marquis Victor d'), heir of the Marquis
d'Aiglemont and nephew of the dowager Comtesse de
Listomere-Landon; born in 1783. After having been the lover of the
Marechale de Carigliano, he married, in the latter part of 1813 (at
which time he was one of the youngest and most dashing colonels of
the French cavalry),