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Updated: June 18, 2025
The French peasantry have never been able to accept the loss of Alsace and Lorraine as an accomplished fact; they look on the retention of those provinces by the Germans as a temporary arrangement until France can at the right moment wrest them out of her powerful rival's hand. Boulanger's popularity rose to fever-heat.
Boulanger's picture gave Balzac a great deal of trouble, as well as delighted yet anxious speculation about Madame Hanska's opinion of it, when it arrived in Wierzchownia.
About Boulanger's picture Theophile Gautier has a good deal to tell us in his article of 1837, published in the Beaux Arts de la Presse; and it scarcely agrees with Balzac's condemnation of the portrait as a daub, when he saw the canvas some years later in Russia.
Then to explain his visit he said that his ploughman, the man of the blood-letting, still suffered from giddiness. "I'll call round," said Bovary. "No, no! I'll send him to you; we'll come; that will be more convenient for you." "Ah! very good! I thank you." And as soon as they were alone, "Why don't you accept Monsieur Boulanger's kind offer?"
It had just passed the spot, and was drawing away from the voices, when it suddenly stopped and swung round. But for a dexterous stroke of Boulanger's paddle it must have turned over, for it had come right across a long bramble that had become submerged. "What was that?" exclaimed one of the New England men; "it sounded like a paddle."
Great was Boulanger's delight, while Isidore on donning the new made, and by no means unornamental moccasins, declared that nothing could be more comfortable, and that he felt able to accomplish any journey that the guide might think fit to lay out for the day.
"Fear nothing, madame; I came up by the drift, which runs right down into the ditch. Turn then to the right, and you will come upon another drift, which will take you out upon the slope. At the foot of it you will find an Indian, who will conduct you to my tribe, and they will conceal you till they can make their way to Boulanger's cottage, near Quebec. Hasten, I beseech you.
So the little curtain was drawn as noiselessly as possible to keep out the rays of the now setting sun, and creeping away stealthily on tiptoe, the kind-hearted and hospitable couple left their visitor to his dreams. The sun had not only set, but had risen again when Isidore was aroused from his sleep by the noisy gambols of Boulanger's little ones beneath the window.
The war feeling in France diminished, and though it revived for a time owing to the arrest of the French frontier police commissary Schnaebele, it finally died out on that officer's release at the particular request of the Czar to Emperor William. Boulanger's subsequent history only concerns France.
From this, it seems as though Theophile Gautier must have read his knowledge of Balzac's character as a whole into his interpretation of the picture. To the ordinary observer, Boulanger's portrait represents Balzac as the thinker, worker, and fighter, stern and strenuous; not the delightful comrade who inspired joy and merriment, and the recollection of whom made Heine smile on his death-bed.
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