III. AN INTRODUCTION TO SOCIETY
108. cannons of elder: Being hollow stemmed, elder twigs are ideal for making blowpipes or pea-shooters.
109. There is talk … silence as to the rest: A witty misquotation from Corneille’s Cinna (IV. 1290).
110. twenty thousand livres per year: Balzac appears to suggest that a canny tailor recognizes that the clothes he provides allow a young man to make his fortune, and that his return may not ultimately be in money, but in reputation. As Robb observes in his biography (Balzac, p. 137), Balzac scatters flattering references to his own tailor, Buisson, throughout the Human Comedy, as a ‘novel way of paying bills “without spending any money” ’.
111. Rue Saint-Jacques … Rue des Saints-Pères: That is, the Latin Quarter, centred around the Sorbonne.
112. projected thoughts … catch us unawares: Balzac’s ideas on thought, will and energy reflect his interest in Emanuel Swedenborg’s system of spiritual philosophy and Franz Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism (and are exposed in detail in his novels Louis Lambert and Séraphîta).
113. the cause of his death: Joachim Murat (1767–1815) came from the Lot region in south-west France. He served Napoleon effectively in the coup d’état of 1799 and was rewarded with the hand of his younger sister Caroline. Murat distinguished himself with daring acts of bravery in the most important battles of the age: Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, and was made King of Naples in 1808. However, after the battle of Borodino, he wavered in his loyalty to Napoleon and abandoned the retreating army, in an unsuccessful bid to save his kingdom from the Austrian troops. In October 1815 he made a last reckless bid to recover Naples, almost unaided, but was taken prisoner and shot.
114. the Midi: The south of France, or the area below an imaginary line dividing France east–west at Brive-la-Gaillarde and Valence (roughly corresponding to the old north–south language divisions of Oïl and Oc).
115. King of Sweden: The reference is to Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1764–1844), one of Napoleon’s most controversial marshals, who was born in Pau, in the Pyrenees. He married Désirée Clary, Bonaparte’s former fiancée, and was elected Crown Prince and regent of Sweden in 1810. When France occupied Swedish Pomerania in 1812, he switched allegiances and joined the Sixth Coalition (Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Austria, German states) against Napoleon. He became King Charles XIV of Sweden in 1818, founding the present royal dynasty.
116. Cellini: The memoirs of the famous (and notorious) Florentine sculptor and goldsmith (1500–1571) were published in French in 1822. Berlioz was also an admirer: his opera Benvenuto Cellini was first performed in Paris in 1838.
117. in the nets at Saint-Cloud: Nets were cast into the Seine at Saint-Cloud to catch the corpses of the drowned as they floated downstream.
118. I’ve spent some time in the Midi: This is explained at note 164 to avoid revealing elements of plot.
120. T for thief: French convicts were branded with the initials ‘T.F.’ for Travaux Forcés (‘hard labour’).
121. Villèle … Manuel: That is, falsifying election results by ‘reading’ the wrong name on the ballot. 1819 was a general election year. Joseph Villèle was an ultra-royalist leader and (Restoration) government supporter; Jacques-Antoine Manuel was a republican lawyer and member of the opposing ‘Independent’ or liberal faction.
122. on the shelf: The French refers to the custom of calling a woman a catherinette if she reached twenty-five and was still single on St Catherine’s day (25 November). The term originated with seamstresses, who would make a special hat to wear to the bal des catherinettes.
123. Longchamp: Not a reference to the racecourse, which didn’t exist at the time the novel was written, but most likely to the fashionable custom of promenading carriages through the Bois de Boulogne, from Porte Maillot to Longchamp.
124. ten likely lads: A reference which brings to mind the Thirteen: ‘They were thirteen kings – anonymous, but really kings; more than kings: judges and executioners too, they had equipped themselves with wings in order to soar over society in its heights and depths, and disdained to occupy any place in it, because they had unlimited power over it’ (from Balzac’s preface to History of the Thirteen, tr. Hunt, 1974).
125. Aubry: During his time in charge of military operations on the Committee of Public Safety between April and August 1795, François Aubry relieved Bonaparte of the artillery command of the Italian army. However, he himself was deported to Cayenne (French Guiana) after the coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797).
126. I want … holding you to account: Slavery was first abolished in France in 1794 by the Convention, restored in 1802 by the Consulate (Bonaparte), and definitively abolished in 1848 by the Second Republic. Balzac’s younger brother Henri married a Creole woman and owned around thirty black slaves on the island of Mauritius. He returned to France in 1834, financially ruined.
127. a quint and a quatorze: In the card game Piquet, a quint is a sequence of five cards of the same suit counting as fifteen and a quatorze is a set of four aces, kings, queens, knaves or tens, counting as fourteen.
128. Cadran-Bleu … Ambigu-Comique: The Cadran-Bleu restaurant took its name from a sign with a clock-face showing four o’clock. Situated on the Boulevard du Temple, it was frequented by a bourgeois rather than fashionable clientele. The Ambigu-Comique, on the same road, was one of the largest theatres in Paris and attracted mainly working-class audiences to the melodramas it showed.
129. Some sniff out dowries … bound hand and foot: Vautrin suggests four methods of making money: marrying a rich woman, profit-taking on the liquidation of business concerns (just as Grandet turns his dead brother’s liquidation to his own account, in Eugénie Grandet), vote-rigging in an election, or selling a newspaper, whose subscribers are committed for a certain amount of time, and powerless to protest.
130. Taillefer … the Revolution: This story is told in Balzac’s ‘The Red Inn’ (included in Selected Short Stories, tr. Sylvia Raphael, Penguin Classics, 1977).
131. the Conservatoire: The Paris museum known as the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers was founded in 1794 and houses collections of machines, scientific instruments and inventions.
132. La Fayette: The Marquis de La Fayette (1757–1834) was a soldier and statesman, of Liberal ideals. He fought in the American Revolution (becoming a lifelong friend of George Washington), and was involved in drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in July 1789.
133. the prince: A reference to Talleyrand, the French statesman whose skilled diplomacy at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) secured better-than-expected terms for France. Balzac was an admirer. See note 78.
134. primitive words: In grammar or philology, original or radical words, from which others are formed, as opposed to derivative words; or alternatively, the primeval stage of a parent language.
135. Lacedaemonia: The ancient Greek name for Sparta, whose ruling class turned from the arts, philosophy and literature towards war and diplomacy, to build up the most powerful army in Greece. The warrior class rewarded bravery with glory, and trained its young men to be ruthless and cunning.
137. the Duc d’Escars: Royalist general and renowned gastronomist, who was made a duke by Louis XVIII and became his senior maître d’hôtel. He reputedly died of indigestion in 1822.
139. Cherubino: The Count’s desiring and desired adolescent page, in Beaumarchais’ satirical comedy Le Mariage de Figaro (Paris, 1784), upon which the Mozart comic opera, Le Nozze di Figaro (Vienna, 1786), was based.
140. Ssince … vell resseeft: Balzac is said to have modelled Nucingen’s Teutonic accent on that of the powerful banker James de Rothschild.
141. Alceste … Jeanie Deans: Alceste, the main character in Molière’s play The Misanthrope (1666), makes himself unpopular through his determination to flout social convention and be honest at all costs. Jeanie Deans is the principled heroine of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (translated into French in 1818 as La Prison d’Edimbourg), who sees her sister sentenced to death rather than tell a white lie.
142. Ecole de Droit: The law faculty of the Sorbonne university.
143. Jardin du Luxembourg: A large public park in the sixth arrondissement not far from the Sorbonne.
144. asks the reader … by killing a mandarin in China solely by force of will: The passage appears to come from Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du christianisme (1802), I.6.2, rather than Rousseau.
145. Gordian knot: ‘An intricate knot tied by Gordius, king of Gordium in Phrygia. The oracle declared that whoever should loosen it should rule Asia, and Alexander the Great overcame the difficulty by cutting through the knot with his sword’ (OED).
146. Cuvier’s lecture: The renowned naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) began his career in Paris as the protégé of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the dedicatee of this novel, but later in life became his rival. Their bitter clash of ideas in 1830 caused great controversy: both sought to explain the diversity of nature, but (roughly), Cuvier focused on function (and the differences between species), Saint-Hilaire on structure (and the similarities). Both positions found their way into Darwin’s theory of evolution. Balzac admired and was influenced by both men. He attended Cuvier’s lectures at the Natural History Museum in 1818. The Jardin des Plantes (botanical gardens) is in the fifth arrondissement, near the Gare d’Austerlitz. See also note 1.
147. the Ladies of the Petit Château: A clique of high-ranking noblewomen close to the king’s brother (who would become Charles X in 1824, on the death of the former king, Louis XVIII).
148. elegy … choleric: The concept of the four ‘complexions’ or ‘temperaments’ – melancholic, phlegmatic (or lymphatic), sanguine and choleric – was founded on that of the four humours (black bile, phlegm, red blood and yellow bile respectively). The elegy is a poetic form traditionally used to lament the dead (hence Balzac associates it with the watery and insipid temperament of a phlegmatic); the dithyramb is ‘a Greek choric hymn, originally in honour of Dionysus or Bacchus, vehement and wild in character; a Bacchanalian song’ (OED), and is thus fit to express the tempestuous and enthusiastic (choleric) sentiments of a Rastignac.
149. a typical banker’s house … marble mosaic landings: A reference to the grand houses built in this area at the end of the eighteenth century, designed by architects such as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), according to neoclassical or Palladian ideals. Many were demolished later in the nineteenth century.
150. Number NINE: At the time, there were five gaming-houses near the Palais-Royal: Numbers 9, 36, 113, 129 and 154. In the course of the Human Comedy, Balzac’s characters turn up at four of them.
151. the misdemeanours … drives them to commit: The Code Civil (note 54) reduced women to the status of children in the eyes of the law. In La Physiologie du Mariage (1829), Balzac argues that women should have greater freedom, particularly in legal terms.
152. a thousand écus: Rastignac returns to the carriage with 7,000 francs in winnings, having given the old man 200 francs (ten louis) in return for his advice. Delphine needs 6,000 francs to pay back de Marsay. So all she can give him is 1,000 francs, while wishing that it was 1,000 écus (calculating here in the pre-revolutionary écu, equal to six livres, so approximately 6,000 francs). See Note on Money.
153. parochialorama: Balzac writes patriarcalorama (‘patriarchalorama’), perhaps because the boarding house is home to unfashionable old men such as Goriot and Poiret.
154. meticulous in the matter of his linen: In his Traité de la vie élégante (‘Treatise of Fashionable Life’, 1830), Balzac considers clothes as markers of social standing, developing an idea previously introduced in the Code des gens honnêtes (‘Code for Respectable People’, 1825): ‘Speak, walk, eat or dress, and I’ll tell you who you are’. On the specific matter of linen, he quotes one of the mottos of Regency dandy Beau Brummell: ‘no perfumes, but very fine linen, plenty of it’. Balzac himself paid great attention to his linen, and ran up huge laundry bills.
155. Mirabeau: Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau (1749–91), was a skilful orator and one of the leading political figures of the earliest phase of the Revolution, despite his aristocratic background. He led a life of dissipation as a young man, running up huge gambling debts and conducting scandalous love affairs.
156. taenias: Tapeworms, parasites that suck their host dry.
157. Absent-minded man: One of the satirical sketches of various human types in Jean de la Bruyère’s The Characters (1688), although the episode mentioned here doesn’t feature in it.
158. Saint Hubert’s day: This fell on 3 November, and opened the hunting season. Saint Hubert is the patron saint of hunters and hunting.
159. Monsieur de Turenne: A reference to one of Louis XIV’s greatest marshals, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne (1611–75).
160. those who crown themselves kings: Such as Napoleon Bonaparte, who on 2 December 1804, in the presence of the Pope, crowned himself Emperor of the French, signalling that he owed his position to his own efforts, and that he recognized no overlord.
161. Venice Preserv’d: A tragedy by Thomas Otway (1652–85), which first appeared in 1682. The two main characters, Pierre, a foreign soldier, and Jaffier, a Venetian nobleman, form an intimate bond which ends in suicide. Vautrin’s take on the play reveals his values, the importance that the bonds between men, in life and in love, have for him, and provides one of many hints in the novel as to (the nature of) his homosexuality.