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HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Little French Masterpieces

By

HONORÉ DE BALZAC


Edited by

Alexander Jessup


An Introduction by

Ferdinand Brunetière


The Translation by

George Burnham Ives

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press

1903




Contents


  HONORÉ DE BALZAC
  THE UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE
  A SEASHORE DRAMA
  AN EPISODE UNDER THE TERROR
  LA GRANDE BRETÈCHE
  THE CONSCRIPT
  A PASSION IN THE DESERT





INTRODUCTION




HONORÉ DE BALZAC

(1799-1850)


Balzac's short stories, which we call in French _nouvelles_, are,
generally speaking, not the best-known or the most popular part of his
work; nor are they the part best fitted to give a true and complete
idea of his genius. But some of them are none the less masterpieces in
their kind; they have characteristics and a significance not always
possessed by their author's long novels, such as _Eugénie Grandet_ or
_Cousin Pons;_ and finally, for this very reason, they hold in the
unfinished structure of _The Human Comedy_ a place which it will be
interesting to try to determine. That is all that will be attempted in
this Introduction.

Some of the stories contained in the present volume were written
under curious circumstances. In the first place it is to be noted
that they all date from 1830, 1831, and 1832[1] and therefore precede
the conception and planning of _The Human Comedy_. Their value is far
from being diminished by that fact. _An Episode under the Terror_
(1830), for instance, was composed as an introduction to the _Memoirs_
of Sanson--that executioner who of all executioners in the world's
history probably despatched the fewest criminals and yet shed the most
blood; and the _Memoirs_ themselves, which are entirely apocryphal,
are also in part Balzac's own work. But, though composed in this way,
to order and as a piece of hack work, _An Episode under the Terror_ is
in its artistic brevity one of Balzac's most tragic and most finished
narratives. _La Grande Bretèche_ (1832) was at first only an episode
inserted among the more extended narratives of which it made part, as
in the old-fashioned novel of tales within tales of which _Gil Blas_
is the type; and brief as it is, Balzac nevertheless rewrote it three
or four times. It is therefore anything but an improvisation. Yet no
other of these short stories can give more vividly than _La Grande
Bretèche_ the impression of a work sprung at once in full completeness
from its author's brain, and conceived from the very first in its
indivisible unity. But, precisely, it is one of the characteristic
traits of Balzac's genius that we hardly need to know when or for
what purpose he wrote this or that one of his novels or stories.
He bore them all within him at once--we might say that the germ of
them was preëxistent in him before he had any conscious thought of
objectivising them. His characters were born in him, as though from
all eternity, before he knew them himself; and before he himself
suspected it, _The Human Comedy_ was alive, was confusedly moving,
was slowly shaping itself, in his brain. This point must be clearly
seen before he can be understood or appreciated at his true value.
However much interest a monograph on some animal or plant may have in
itself--and that interest, no doubt, is often great--it has far more
through the relations it bears to other monographs and to the whole
field of knowledge of which its subject is only a fragmentary part. So
it is with Balzac's novels and stories. Their interest is not limited
to themselves. They bring out one another's value and significance,
they illustrate and give importance to each other; they have, outside
themselves, a justification for existence. This will become clear if we
compare Mérimée's _Mateo Falcone_, for