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Abstract
Balzac's works about actual artists like Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu have long been studied to derive the author's ideas about the artistic creative process. Eugénie Grandet also deals with art, however, even though there is not a real artist in it. In telling the story of Eugénie and her cousin Charles, Balzac suggests his views on the effects of beauty created by artful arrangement as opposed to the beauty in nature uncrafted by human art.
Keywords:
Notes
1. Elsewhere in Eugénie Grandet, the other characters and the narrator repeatedly describe Charles as a woman. Nanon, the Saumur Grandet's domestic, herself in certain ways very traditionally masculine, tells her employer that “ce monsieur est vraiment mignon comme une femme” (74) and later recalls him to Eugénie as “un ben doux […] monsieur, quasiment joli, moutonné comme une fille” (185). When he cries over the suicide death of his father, Nanon informs Eugénie that Charles “pleure comme une Madeleine” (113). Her master views his nephew's behavior in the same way, though with no such indulgence. When Nanon speculates on what such Parisians might eat for breakfast, he answers: “Ils sont quasiment comme des filles à marier” (86). Balzac's narrator also describes the young Parisian as behaving like a woman. When, the morning after his arrival in Saumur, Charles finally comes down at 11:00 a.m. for a very tardy breakfast, the text notes that “le dandy se laissa aller sur le fauteuil comme une jolie femme qui se pose sur son divan” (100), recalling David's famous portrait of Mme. Recamier or even an odalisque.
2. Ten years before Eugénie Grandet, in 1823, Balzac wrote another novel with a lead character named Eugénie, Wann-Chlore. There are a lot of plot similarities between the two, which may explain why Balzac reused the name for his heroine in the second novel. The young man with whom this earlier Eugénie falls in love, Horace Landon, is never compared to a woman, however. When he absents himself from Wann-Chlore, another woman in love with him, she uses a portrait of him to recall his features (379, 382), but there is no mention of femininity.
3. “Les Finden” were the brother engravers William and Edward Finden, who did engravings taken from many late nineteenth-century English artists and illustrators, including Westall. In the footnote to his edition of the novel, Castex wrote, “nous ne savons pas pourquoi Balzac a écrit les Finden” (56), yet the brothers very often worked together.
4. Tilby provides much sound evidence to support his assertion that Ingres “was, at the level of subject matter at least, [Balzac's] most obvious counterpart among visual artists” (122). He also explains, however, that “it would be difficult to imagine an artistic experience less calculated to appeal to the author of the Comédie humaine” than that sought by Ingres (124). If Balzac shared some of Ingres's techniques in creating his “literary paintings,” he did not aim for the same effects—though he still wanted Ingres to do the portrait of Eugénie for an illustrated edition of his works (Citron 9). Bonard shows that some of those effects—a contrast between light and a surrounding darkness, for example—Balzac clearly got from Rembrandt and other Dutch masters, who were being discovered in France in the nineteenth century (138–54).
5. It is interesting to compare Eugénie Grandet with Wann-Chlore on this issue as well. When, after having seen him pass by her home several times, Eugénie d’Arneuse finally meets Horace Landon (ch. 4), she is struck by various of his physical traits but not by any harmonious arrangement described as a work of art. Nor does encountering him transform this Eugénie's personality and make her more decisive or masculine. Her mother, Madame d’Arneuse, is as tyrannical as Félix Grandet, but this Eugénie's love gives her no courage to rebel and act independently. True, late in the novel she does finally take a stand against her parent's tyranny—“ce n’était plus cette jeune fille craintive et timide, mais une jeune femme […] ferme surtout dans ses résolutions courageuses” (330)—but not because she is inspired by a work of art. Rather, “Landon, enfin, dans le désir de la soustraire à l’autorité maternelle, lui avait inspiré la conscience de sa propre valeur et de sa force” (330). The preoccupation with the artistic expression of beauty and its transformative effects on the susceptible viewer is all new with Eugénie Grandet.
6. For Schor this scene “reveals the always implicit presence of a male observer in all scenes of female auto-contemplation” (96), but it is much more than that. In deciding that she is not beautiful enough to attract Charles—“Je ne suis pas assez belle pour lui” (81)—Eugénie indicates that, while she may admire her cousin's small, soft hands and find his face and voice feminine, she in no way reads them as harbingers of nonnormative sexual desire. As historians of sexuality such as Joseph Bristow have argued, what we see as “feminine” demeanor and homosexual desire in men did not become solidly linked in the Western popular imagination until the Oscar Wilde trial at the end of the nineteenth century.
7. Laubriet claimed that Balzac wrote Mme Hanska with regard to Eugénie Grandet that “l’amour de la jeune fille pour son cousin est celui de Balzac pour son Ève” (509–510), and cited in support of that contention p. 95 in the edition of Balzac's letters to Mme Hanska entitled Lettres à l’étrangère, where we find this passage: “Il faut aimer, mon Ève, ma chérie, pour faire l’amour d’Eugénie Grandet, amour pur, immense, fier!” (In the more recent edition of those letters, Lettres à Madame Hanska, the passage is found in vol. I, p. 135.) In other words, Balzac saw some of himself in his female creation, which may explain at least in part why he endowed her with that “front masculin” and the sensitivity to art to profit from it. Elsewhere, as we shall see shortly, Eugénie is compared to the Virgin Mary (83, 232).
8. Neither Eugénie d’Arneuse nor Wann-Chlore is described as having masculine traits in the earlier novel.
9. For a good discussion of the extent to which Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu represents Balzac's theories on art see Berg's chapter on the short novel.
10. Eugénie Grandet's revenge on Charles for marrying another woman is far more powerful and decisive than the bizarre actions of Eugénie d’Arneuse when the latter discovers that Horace Landon has married Wann-Chlore. This Eugénie cannot bring herself to separate herself from Landon, even through he has betrayed her, so she decides to work as his domestic in order to be near him: “Il est perdu pour moi! répéta-t-elle; et cependant, le voir, c’est toute ma vie! Pourquoi ne serais-je pas son esclave, sa servante? … ” […] “Oui ! s’écria-t-elle, j’en aurai le courage! Nulle femme n’aura porté si loin le dévouement de l’amour !” (426). That may be the fantasy woman of some self-centered men, but it is not someone who has learned to think and act for herself thanks to the transformative powers of art.
11. As she instructs the Président de Bonfons on how he is to inform Charles of his blunder and that she will marry Bonfons if he agrees to do so, Eugénie tells her long-time suitor, “j’ai dans le coeur un sentiment inextinguible” (249). Readers are likely to assume that she means she still harbors love for Charles, especially since this phrase is part of her explanation that she will marry Bonfons only if she does not have to have sex with him. Lucey makes a convincing argument that such an assumption is not necessarily warranted, however (59–60).
12. More traditional male scholars have displayed those prejudices well into the twentieth century. In 1964 Pierre Citron, for example, wrote that “Eugénie reste seule, sans bonheur” (21), as if Nanon and Cornoiller and Eugénie's relationship with them do not count because they are not of the same class.
13. In addition to the various studies devoted specifically to Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu, which Berg does a good job of reviewing in his chapter on that text, there have been more general works on Balzac and art, primarily Bonard and Laubriet (on painting see in particular 382–402), but also Caramaschi's chapter on Balzac, L’artiste selon Balzac, and Scott. Like the studies of Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu, the last two of these tend to focus on how Balzac used artists as a means of talking about the creative process, however, rather than about the effect of art on its audience. As Tilby has remarked: “It was principally through his various fictional artists that Balzac expressed his theories on the nature of the creative process” (111).
Caramaschi considers several of Balzac's texts, most exensively Les Chouans, for prefigurations of the Impressionist concerns and techniques that Monet would develop at the end of the century. Surprisingly, he mentions Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu, which at times reads like an Impressionist manifesto avant la lettre, only in passing (75).
14. This reference to Raphael once again situates Balzac in the camp of the academic painters of his time, whose leader, Ingres, proclaimed Raphael as their model, in opposition to the great Romantic painters led and inspired by Ingres's chief rival, Delacroix.