The Thirteen | Page 2

great mass of the /Comedie Humaine/, with its largeness and reality
of life, as in life itself; the figure of Paquita justifies its presence.
Considering the /Histoire des Treize/ as a whole, it is of engrossing

interest. And I must confess I should not think much of any boy who,
beginning Balzac with this series, failed to go rather mad over it. I
know there was a time when I used to like it best of all, and thought not
merely /Eugenie Grandet/, but /Le Pere Goriot/ (though not the /Peau
de Chagrin/), dull in comparison. Some attention, however, must be
paid to two remarkable characters, on whom it is quite clear that Balzac
expended a great deal of pains, and one of whom he seems to have
"caressed," as the French say, with a curious admixture of dislike and
admiration.
The first, Bourignard or Ferragus, is, of course, another, though a
somewhat minor example--Collin or Vautrin being the chief--of that
strange tendency to take intense interest in criminals, which seems to
be a pretty constant eccentricity of many human minds, and which laid
an extraordinary grasp on the great French writers of Balzac's time. I
must confess, though it may sink me very low in some eyes, that I have
never been able to fully appreciate the attractions of crime and
criminals, fictitious or real. Certain pleasant and profitable things, no
doubt, retain their pleasure and their profit, to some extent, when they
are done in the manner which is technically called criminal; but they
seem to me to acquire no additional interest by being so. As the
criminal of fact is, in the vast majority of cases, an exceedingly
commonplace and dull person, the criminal of fiction seems to me only,
or usually, to escape these curses by being absolutely improbable and
unreal. But I know this is a terrible heresy.
Henri de Marsay is a much more ambitious and a much more
interesting figure. In him are combined the attractions of criminality,
beauty, brains, success, and, last of all, dandyism. It is a well-known
and delightful fact that the most Anglophobe Frenchmen--and Balzac
might fairly be classed among them--have always regarded the English
dandy with half-jealous, half-awful admiration. Indeed, our novelist, it
will be seen, found it necessary to give Marsay English blood. But
there is a tradition that this young Don Juan--not such a good fellow as
Byron's, nor such a /grand seigneur/ as Moliere's--was partly intended
to represent Charles de Remusat, who is best known to this generation
by very sober and serious philosophical works, and by his part in his
mother's correspondence. I do not know that there ever were any
imputation on M. de Remusat's morals; but in memoirs of the time, he

is, I think, accused of a certain selfishness and /hauteur/, and he
certainly made his way, partly by journalism, partly by society, to
power very much as Marsay did. But Marsay would certainly not have
written /Abelard/ and the rest, or have returned to Ministerial rank in
our own time. Marsay, in fact, more fortunate than Rubempre, and of a
higher stamp and flight than Rastignac, makes with them Balzac's
trinity of sketches of the kind of personage whose part, in his day and
since, every young Frenchman has aspired to play, and some have
played. It cannot be said that "a moral man is Marsay"; it cannot be said
that he has the element of good-nature which redeems Rastignac. But
he bears a blame and a burden for which we Britons are responsible in
part--the Byronic ideal of the guilty hero coming to cross and blacken
the old French model of unscrupulous good humor. It is not a very
pretty mixture or a very worthy ideal; but I am not so sure that it is not
still a pretty common one.
The association of the three stories forming the /Histoire des Treize/ is,
in book form, original, inasmuch as they filled three out of the four
volumes of /Etudes des Moeurs/ published in 1834-35, and themselves
forming part of the first collection of /Scenes de la Vie Parisienne/. But
/Ferragus/ had appeared in parts (with titles to each) in the /Revue de
Paris/ for March and April 1833, and part of /La Duchesse de Langeais/
in the /Echo de la Jeune France/ almost contemporaneously. There are
divisions in this also. /Ferragus/ and /La Duchesse/ also appeared
without /La Fille aux Yeux d'Or/ in 1839, published in one volume by
Charpentier, before their absorption at the usual time in the /Comedie/.
George Saintsbury

THE THIRTEEN

AUTHOR'S PREFACE
In the Paris of the Empire there were found Thirteen men equally
impressed with the same idea, equally endowed with energy enough to
keep them true to it, while among themselves they were