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Updated: May 10, 2025
Notwithstanding its long incubation of nearly a decade, and the advantage it possessed in embodying so much personal experience, Mercadet was still weak in construction and was largely wanting in dramatic compression. And, at fifty years of age, with failing powers, Balzac would have found the task increasingly hard to acquire an art for which, by his own confession, he had no born aptitude.
He may have known Abbot Milo again, or Mercadet, his lean good captain: he said nothing to either of them. His friends were confounded: here was the gallant shell of King Richard with a new insatiable tenant. So indeed they found it. There was great business to be done: war, the holding of Assise, the redressing of wrongs from the sea to the Pyrenees. He did it, but in a terrible, hasty way.
The same author's Question d'Argent, composed a few years later, was a more direct tribute to the modifying power of the Comedie Humaine. It was Balzac's Mercadet the Jobber remodelled with a larger stage science. Ludovic Halevy apparently wished every one to perceive what he owed to the father of French realism.
Perhaps, after all, in such connection, the one or two of Balzac's plays that went so resolutely off the old lines the Resources of Quinola and Mercadet, may have served, in remembrance, despite their insignificance beside the novels, which were the true drama, to awaken the attention of professional dramatists, especially as one after another story of the Comedy was dramatized.
Richard's troops were chiefly Brabancon mercenaries, or free-companions a lawless soldiery, deservedly execrated; and their captain, Mercadet, was a favorite of the King on account of his dauntless courage and enterprise. In a skirmish, Mercadot took prisoner the Bishop of Beauvais, one of the warlike prelates who forgot their proper office.
All through the month of June the patient was under medical treatment, able to go out only in a carriage, and, even so, in disobedience to the doctor's orders. One of these visits was to the door of the Comedie Francaise, where Arsene Houssaye, the Director, came to speak to him about Mercadet, and indulgently promised him, it should be staged soon, the Resources of Quinola also.
The next edition of the Theatre Complet, in 1855, reinstated the prefaces. It was not until 1865 that Mercadet joined the other four in a single volume published by Mme. Houssiaux. Vautrin, a drama in five acts, was presented for the first time in the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre, March 14, 1840.
The presented version in three acts has generally been regarded as the more acceptable, M. de Lovenjoul, the Balzacian commentator, recognizing its superior claims. It is the form now included in current French editions, and the one followed in the present edition. Although Mercadet, like the others, excited the ridicule of supercilious critics, it has proven superior to them and to time.
He describes poverty as the supreme evil, and wealth as the object of universal aspiration. In line with this attitude comes Mercadet with his trials and schemes.
Instead, it inveighs against that spirit of greed and lust for gain which places a money value even upon affection. But during all the arraignment, Balzac, the born speculator, cannot conceal a sympathy for the wily Mercadet while the promoter's manoeuvres to escape his creditors must have been a recollection in part of some of Balzac's own pathetic struggles.
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