The Human Comedy Read Free Page B

in the vanguard during the three “glorious days” of the Revolution of 1830: New rules tightening censorship of newspapers helped to spark the insurrection.
    The Revolution was no more to Balzac’s liking than the Restoration. The rule of a king who dressed in the bourgeois black frock coat and top hat only confirmed his cynical view of the forces in control of his country. France entered an era of capitalist and industrial expansion. “ Enrichissez-vous ”: get rich, the prime minister François Guizot said (perhaps apocryphally) to his countrymen. And so the French did—at least those who had the means to invest in factories, railroads, and various manipulative stock market schemes. The workers—witness the revolts of the Lyons silk workers and various short-lived uprisings of the Paris proletariat—were largely excluded from this newfound prosperity. Balzac, writing most of his Human Comedy in the 1830s and 1840s, after the July Revolution but setting the majority of his tales under the Restoration, has the benefit of a historian’s hindsight on a regime and a cultural moment that failed. That lends depth to his analysis. But hindsight also increased his anxiety about the future of French society. If social historians continue to find Balzac a great source text, it’s because he delved into most of the forces that were transforming his country and saw what the Marxists call the contradictions of a nascent capitalist society.
    “Capitalist” is what Balzac calls the usurer Gobseck in the long short story, or short novella, that bears his name. It’s possibly a misuse of the term, yet Gobseck’s loans, often at exorbitant rates of interest, do oil the capitalist machinery. At a time when loans between individuals most often took the form of the kind of IOU known as a lettre de change —an exchangeable and discountable promissory note—the moneylender was a key figure. Gobseck sits at the still center of the turning earth in The Human Comedy . He probably appears in more of the novels and tales than any other character, with the possible exception of the lawyer Derville, who is the narrator of Gobseck’s story here. Sooner or later, it seems, everyone must come to Gobseck for cash. In this manner, as he tells the young Derville, he gets to see the spectacle of human emotion in its rawest and most stripped-down condition. Gobseck lives without wearing himself out through the ravages of passion, including sex, that he sees devouring his compatriots. He has learned the superior pleasures of the observer. “Well, I tell you,” he says to Derville, “every human passion, writ larger by the play of social interests, they all come and parade before me in my life of calm. Furthermore, that scientific curiosity of yours, a kind of struggle with man always getting the worst of it—I replace it with insight into the springs that set mankind moving. In a word, I possess the world with no effort at all, and the world has no grip on me.”
    Money offers possession of the world without an expenditure of life’s vital forces—which Balzac believed to be limited, expendable in a brief flaming existence, or else to be hoarded over the long life of the miser and the observer. The elegant young men and women of Paris parade through Gobseck’s life—as well as the honest seamstress Fanny Malvaut, whom he will bring to Derville’s attention. In the process, we as readers get to see the stuff of other dramas recorded elsewhere in The Human Comedy in a new perspective. In particular, “Gobseck” casts a new light on the final chapter of Balzac’s most famous novel, Le Père Goriot . In Old Goriot we saw Anastasie de Restaud, one of Goriot’s daughters, as a tragic figure exploited by her husband; here we are given the husband’s point of view, as he struggles to rescue the family fortune that Anastasie is squandering on her unscrupulous lover, Maxime de Trailles.
    Derville tells the story of Gobseck late one evening in