The Thirteen

The Thirteen

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Title: The Thirteen
Author: Honore de Balzac
Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7416] [This file was first
posted on April 26, 2003]
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THE THIRTEEN
By Honore de Balzac

THE THIRTEEN
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

INTRODUCTION
The /Histoire des Treize/ consists--or rather is built up--of three stories:
/Ferragus/ or the /Rue Soly/, /La Duchesse de Langeais/ or /Ne
touchez-paz a la hache/, and /La Fille aux Yeux d'Or/.

To tell the truth, there is more power than taste throughout the /Histoire
des Treize/, and perhaps not very much less unreality than power.
Balzac is very much better than Eugene Sue, though Eugene Sue also is
better than it is the fashion to think him just now. But he is here, to a
certain extent competing with Sue on the latter's own ground. The
notion of the "Devorants"--of a secret society of men devoted to each
other's interests, entirely free from any moral or legal scruple,
possessed of considerable means in wealth, ability, and position, all
working together, by fair means or foul, for good ends or bad--is, no
doubt, rather seducing to the imagination at all times; and it so
happened that it was particularly seducing to the imagination of that
time. And its example has been powerful since; it gave us Mr.
Stevenson's /New Arabian Nights/ only, as it were, the other day.

But there is something a little schoolboyish in it; and I do not know that
Balzac has succeeded entirely in eliminating this something. The
pathos of the death, under persecution, of the innocent Clemence does
not entirely make up for the unreasonableness of the whole situation.
Nobody can say that the abominable misconduct of Maulincour--who is
a hopeless "cad"--is too much punished, though an Englishman may
think that Dr. Johnson's receipt of three or four footmen with cudgels,
applied repeatedly and unsparingly, would have been better than
elaborately prepared accidents and duels, which were too honorable for
a Peeping Tom of this kind; and poisonings, which reduced the
avengers to the level of their victim. But the imbroglio is of itself stupid;
these fathers who cannot be made known to husbands are mere stage
properties, and should never be fetched out of the theatrical lumber-
room by literature.
/La Duchesse de Langeais/ is, I think, a better story, with more
romantic attraction, free from the objections just made to /Ferragus/,
and furnished with a powerful, if slightly theatrical catastrophe. It is as
good as anything that its author has done of the kind, subject to those
general considerations of probability and otherwise which have been
already hinted at. For those who are not troubled by any such critical
reflections, both, no doubt, will be highly satisfactory.
The third of the series, /La Fille aux Yeux d'Or/, in some respects one
of Balzac's most brilliant effects, has been looked at askance by many
of his English readers. At one time he had the audacity to think of
calling it /La Femme aux Yeux Rouges/. To those who consider the
story morbid or, one may say, /bizarre/, one word of justification,
hardly of apology, may be offered. It was in the scheme of the
/Comedie Humaine/ to survey social life in its entirety by a minute
analysis of its most diverse constituents. It included all the pursuits and
passions, was large and patient, and unafraid. And the patience, the
curiosity, of the artist which made Cesar Birotteau and his bankrupt
ledgers matters of high import to us, which did not shrink from creating
a Vautrin and a Lucien de Rubempre, would have been incomplete had
it stopped short of a Marquise de San-Real, of a Paquita Valdes. And in
the