As anyone who has spent time living in a Parisian garret will tell you, the romantic notion of it dies pretty quickly, especially during a sweltering summer or a teeth-chattering winter. The great French writer Honoré de Balzac’s own youthful experience of such straitened circumstances led to this evocative description in his 1831 novel, The Wild Ass’s Skin: “Nothing could be more sordid than this attic with its dirty yellow walls which smelt of poverty and seemed to await a needy scholar.”
Needy scholars, such as Lucien de Rubempré and Eugène de Rastignac, are a key human component of Balzac’s wonderful literary undertaking La Comédie Humaine, which consists of 91 individual works, including novels, short stories, and essays. But what of Paris itself?
There is no doubt that Balzac looked upon the city as a kind of muse. On one occasion he described the streets as possessing “human qualities” and added that “we can not shake off the impressions they make upon our minds.”
Eric Hazan’s delightful cultural history Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy, ably translated from the French by David Fernbach, traces the roughly 35 years that Balzac spent living and working in the City of Light. (Ironically, he complained bitterly about the ugliness of gas lighting after it was first introduced there, in 1829.)
Hazan, who died last month, notes that most novels set in Paris use the street to provide a backdrop against which the characters have their adventures. “The Balzacian street is different,” Hazan writes. “The places where the characters live and evolve are part of their personality; they define them in the same way as their physique, their dress or their psychology.”
Balzac looked upon the city as a kind of muse. He described the streets as possessing “human qualities” and added that “we can not shake off the impressions they make upon our minds.”
Balzac moved to Paris from Tours, in the Loire Valley, in 1814, at the age of 15, when his father was appointed director of supplies for one of the oldest divisions of the French Army. The young Balzac undertook law studies but dropped out after deciding it would be a lot more interesting to earn a living as a writer.
After three years of living in a garret on Rue de Lesdinguières, supported by a miserly allowance from his father, Balzac completed a five-act tragedy in verse about Oliver Cromwell. It was by no means a glowing debut. The manuscript was sent to a professor who wrote back saying that “the author should do anything he likes, but not literature.”
Indeed, it took close to a decade before Balzac wrote his breakthrough novel, Les Chouans (1829), a historical romance set in Brittany. During those fallow years he had tried his hand at all manner of business ventures, including publishing, printing, and typesetting, but each time they were met with failure.
The crippling debts that he accrued and never really managed to pay back led to him constantly trying to stay one step ahead of his creditors. Hazan suggests that it was for this reason that Balzac had to move house at least 10 times.
One of his longest stays was the seven years he spent in the village of Passy (now part of Paris’s 16th Arrondissement and the site of the Maison de Balzac), from 1840 to 1847. It was here, at the age of 42, that he came up with the title of La Comédie Humaine for an interlocking literary enterprise whereby the same characters, streets, and haunts reappear from one novel to the next.
Fueled by dozens of cups of coffee (often drank cold), Balzac was a tireless writer, but no less a walker. “There are memories for me at every doorway, thoughts at each lamppost,” he wrote. “There is no facade constructed, no building pulled down, whose birth or death I have not spied on. I partake in the immense movement of this world as if its soul was mine.”
It remains a truism among historians that if you want to get a measure of post-Napoleonic Paris, La Comédie Humaine is as good a place as any to start. In marvelous novels such as Father Goriot (1835), Lost Illusions (published serially between 1837 and 1843), and Cousin Bette (1846), Balzac distinguishes between an old Paris and a new one developing on its shoulders.
“The emergence of entire districts, financial speculation, the construction of the nouveaux riches,” Hazan writes, “this is the background noise of La Comédie Humaine, an incomparable picture of the formation of a city.” For Hazan, whose books include The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps (2010), Paris belonged to Balzac and vice versa.
“Ah! No one will know so well as I do the delicious hours when Paris falls asleep, when the last roll of a coach resounds, when the songs of companions cease.” Lyrical boastfulness from Balzac? Not a bit of it. As far as Hazan is concerned: “History would prove him right.”
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books
