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]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: US-ASCII
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Etext prepared by Dagny , Bonnie Sala, and John Bickers

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 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