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Updated: June 8, 2025
The author conducts her to the door of womanhood, and there he leaves her with the joys and troubles, no doubt, of her new estate; but with these he apparently does not consider himself to be concerned, though he seems to have meditated at this time a sort of small comédie humaine small, for he must have known that he could not withstand the strain of Balzac's shifts of fourteen hours.
It was in the scheme of the Comedie Humaine to survey social life in its entirety by a minute analysis of its most diverse constituents. It included all the pursuits and passions, was large and patient, and unafraid.
In criticising the importance given to money in La Comedie Humaine, Theophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero in fiction, le heros metallique. Of Shakespeare it may be said he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.
Whereof every man saied, that yt was rather a thinge devine then humaine, to have founde out that way never knowen before, to goe by the west into the easte. This brute of Segnior Columbus did so inflame my harte, that I determyned also to doe some notable thinge.
Most likely the thought occurred to him that such an appellation was more suitable to a strictly scientific treatise than to fiction. The expression Comedie Humaine, which he ultimately adopted, is said to have been suggested to him by his whilom secretary, the Count Auguste de Belloy, after the latter's visit to Italy, during which Dante's Divine Comedy had been read and appreciated.
Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless salon, would lie back in the rickety arm-chair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing, till dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another comédie humaine unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in the contriving optimist mind.
I listened to his outpouring of inanity and obscenity and, listening sympathetically, like some compassionate family doctor, could not help asking myself: Is such a man to be respected, even when sober? Be that as it may, he gave me to understand why some folk are rightly afraid of exposing, under the influence of drink, the bete humaine which lurks below their skin of decency.
The Comedie Humaine is sufficiently rich in original creations for the author to own to this innocent piece of plagiarism; when, like the worthy La Fontaine, he has told unwittingly, and after his own fashion, a tale already related by another. This is not one of the hoaxes in vogue in the year 1830, when every author wrote his "tale of horror" for the amusement of young ladies.
It would be easy to compile a book of sayings from Balzac that would make all "Maximes" and "Pensées," even those of La Rochefoucauld or Joubert, seem trivial and shallow. Balzac was the great moral influence of my life, and my reading culminated in the "Comédie Humaine."
It may be affirmed, without thereby disparaging the Comedie Humaine, that Balzac's personality is even more interesting than his work; and this is a sufficient excuse for returning to it in a last chapter and trying, at the risk of repetition, to make its presentment completer by way of supplement and summary.
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