From what I can figure out, Balzac lived at this place in Ukraine for 3 years – I think the last 3 years of his life – when he was married to this Polish countess.

 

I           INTRODUCTION   Balzac, Honore de (1799-1850), French author, one of the world’s great novelists. Along with many short stories, plays, and essays, Balzac wrote La comédie humaine (1842-1848; translated as The Human Comedy, 1895-1900), a cycle of about 90 novels describing French society in detail.

            II           LIFE  
Balzac was born in Tours. He inherited the exuberant temperament of his businessman father. His mother was a sensitive and moody woman interested in mystical doctrines. Balzac’s own interest in the theories of Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, Austrian physician Franz Mesmer, and others may be explained in part by this early influence.

An undisciplined student in elementary school in Vendôme and high schools in Tours and Paris, Balzac worked briefly as a law clerk in Paris but spent most of his time devouring books of philosophical speculation. He began his literary career writing works that reflected a romantic sentimentality and his youthful intoxication with abstract theorizing.

Discouraged by his initial lack of literary success, Balzac turned to publishing to secure his financial future, but he soon plunged into debt. This was the first of several financial disasters in his life. Henceforth Balzac wrote, often for magazines, on a per-word basis in order to get out of debt, but he never completely succeeded in accomplishing this goal.

            III          WORKS  
Balzac’s first important novel was Les chouans (1829; The Chouans, 1899), based on civil war in the Vendée region of western France during the French Revolution (1789-1799). While it is clearly influenced by romanticism, a literary movement that emphasized individualism, imagination, and emotion, its historical accuracy and factual descriptions became hallmarks of Balzac’s fiction. The relative success of Les chouans was followed by the resounding triumph of two philosophical novels, La peau de chagrin (1831; The Ass’s Skin, 1899) and Louis Lambert (1832; translated 1899). Balzac’s newly acquired fame enabled him to meet a Polish countess, Eveline Hanska. She became the great love of his life, and they finally married shortly before his death.

Balzac reached his full creative maturity between 1833 and 1835, when he wrote and published his masterpieces Le médicin de campagne (1833; The Country Doctor, 1899), Eugénie Grandet (1833; translated 1899), Père Goriot (1834; Old Goriot, 1899), and Le lys dans la vallée (1835; The Lily of the Valley, 1899). During this period he conceived of the idea of linking his novels into a larger whole. In this way he hoped to create a detailed depiction and study of French society from the Revolution to the ascendance of Louis Philippe to the throne in 1830. After 1834 Balzac wrote his novels with a view to inclusion in La comédie humaine, and a 17-volume edition under this title first appeared between 1842 and 1848.

Balzac’s introduction to this edition reflects the impact of the groundbreaking theories of French scientists Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire about the development of animal species. Balzac’s scientific intention is evident in his use of the word studies to describe the three main groups of his works: “Analytic Studies,” “Philosophical Studies,” and “Studies of Manners.” Balzac extended the ideas of Lamarck and Saint-Hilaire to human character and behavior, which he believed were determined by environment and heredity. His goal in La comédie humaine was to depict the human species in France with its many character types and associated behaviors from 1789 to 1830. This undertaking implied a significant degree of historical realism, and, in fact, Balzac is frequently cited as a forerunner of literary realism. Others see in Balzac characteristics of literary romanticism. A brief consideration of Balzac’s novel Père Goriot confirms the correctness of both views.

In the novel Eugène Rastignac arrives in Paris from the provinces in 1819 to study law. He lives in a cheap boarding house, but through the influence of his aristocratic aunt frequents high society. Another resident of the boarding house is old Goriot, a retired merchant who lives humbly so that his two daughters may marry into nobility and live luxuriously. Rastignac meets these daughters in high society and through them becomes friends with Goriot. Vautrin, a mysterious and charismatic boarder, later found to be a notorious criminal, vies with Goriot as a father figure to Rastignac. Vautrin also tries to persuade Rastignac to marry yet another boarder, Mademoiselle Taillefer, who will inherit her father’s entire fortune once Vautrin has murdered her brother. Eventually, the two selfish daughters bankrupt Goriot, who then dies of anguish; Vautrin kills Mademoiselle Taillefer’s brother (although Rastignac has not entered into his conspiracy) and is arrested; and Rastignac alone accompanies old Goriot’s coffin to a cemetery on the hill above Paris, where he dramatically shouts his defiance to the city below and to the Parisian world he had wanted to conquer.

In many ways Rastignac is a young, romantic hero, and Vautrin is the darkly enchanting antihero of much romantic literature. The thrilling and mysterious events and the pursuit of passions and dreams qualify as romantic themes. But the realistic background of the novel overwhelms these aspects. In 1819 France was attempting to retrieve its past as a monarchy, although the Revolution and the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte as French emperor had made this impossible. New fortunes had been established, and the new nobility created by Napoleon vied with the older, established families for power and prestige. Impoverished noblemen sold off their titles to the newly rich, and money emerged as the single source of power. The inhabitants of the boarding house reflect and symbolize the new materialism and its destructive forces.

In 1834 the French novelist Honore de Balzac undertook the challenge of bringing together a series of 150 novels, each commenting on an aspect of French society and depicting society’s pressures on individuals. These he would combine into one immense compendium entitled The Human Comedy. Ultimately the challenge proved too large for Balzac’s lifetime, although he did complete about 90 novels. The following excerpt from Old Goriot (1834-1835) finds an idealistic law student dreaming of his entrance into “gilded salons” via a socially lofty romance.

 

From Old Goriot

By Honore de Balzac

Eugène sat absorbed in thought for several minutes before plunging into his law books.

 

He had just become aware that Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauséant was one of the queens of fashionable Paris, and that her house was known as the pleasantest in the Faubourg Saint-Germaine. She was, moreover, by reason of her name and her fortune, one of the outstanding persons of the aristocratic world. Thanks to his Aunt de Marcillac the poor student had been kindly received in this house before he had realized what a favour this was. To be admitted to these gilded salons was equivalent to being awarded a patent of nobility. By his appearance in this most exclusive of circles he had gained the right of admission everywhere.

 

Eugène had been dazzled by the brilliant assembly, and had scarcely exchanged a few words with the Viscountess. He had contented himself with singling out from among the crowd of Parisian goddesses with which this rout was packed, one of those women at whose feet a young man must fall from the very first. The Countess Anastasie de Restaud was reputed to have the prettiest figure in Paris; she was tall and gracefully made. Imagine great dark eyes, a beautiful hand, a finely modelled foot, and movements full of fire and spirit, a woman that the Marquis de Ronquerolles called ‘a thoroughbred’. Her highly strung temperament had no complementary defect; she was well-developed and rounded, without anyone being able to accuse her of being too plump. ‘Thoroughbred’, ‘woman of breeding’, these locutions were beginning to take the place of the ‘heavenly angels’, the Ossianic figures of speech, all the old erotic mythology which dandies no longer affect. But for Rastignae, Madame Anastasie de Restaud was the woman longed for. He had contrived to write his name twice in the list of partners on her fan, and managed to snatch a few words with her during the first quadrille.

 

‘Where can I see you again, Madame?’ he said abruptly, with the passionate insistence that women find so flattering.

 

‘Oh, anywhere,’ she answered, ‘in the Bois, at the Bouffons, in my own house.’

 

And the adventurous Southerner had done all he could to put himself on a footing of intimacy with this enchanting Countess, so far as a young man can cultivate a woman’s acquaintance during a square dance and a waltz. When he told her that he was a cousin of Madame de Beauséant’s, this great lady, as he took her to be, was prepared to receive him, and he was invited to her house, and the parting smile she threw him made him think that to call on her was a social duty.

 

He had had the good fortune to light upon a man who did not laugh at his ignorance, an unpardonable crime to the gilded young coxcombs of the day, men like Maulincourt, Ronquerolles, Maxime de Trailles, de Marsay, Ajuda-Pinto, Vandenesse, who were there in all the glory and pride of their dandyism, mingling with the most elegant ladies of fashion—Lady Brandon, the Duchesse de Langeais, the Comtesse de Kergarouët, Madame de Sérizy, the Duchess de Carigliano, the Comtesse Férraud, Madame de Lanty, the Marquise d’Aiglemont, Madame Firmiani, the Marquise de Listomère and the Marquise d’Espard, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse and the Grandlieus. It was lucky for him, then, that the green student happened upon the Marquis de Montriveau, the Duchesse de Langeais’ lover, a general as simple as a child, from whom he learned that the Comtesse de Restaud lived in the Rue du Helder.

 

What joy it was to be young, athirst for the world and on fire for a woman, and to see two great houses open their doors to Him! To plant a foot in the Faubourg Saint-Germain in the house of the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, and fall on his knees before the Comtesse de Restaud in the Chaussée d’Antin! To see before him a vista of all the salons of Paris, and to believe himself a fine enough fellow to find aid and protection there in a woman’s heart! To feel himself ambitious enough to spurn the tight-rope along which he must walk with the self-assurance of the acrobat who cannot fall, and to have found in a charming woman the best of balancing-poles! With such thoughts in his head and a vision of this woman rising magnificent beside a fire of peat, between the Law on one side and, Poverty on the other, who would not, like Eugène, have thrown an eager glance into the future, and decked it with success? His wandering fancy was anticipating his future joys so fast that he was dreaming himself by Madame de Restaud’s side, when a sigh like the grunt of an overtasked Saint Joseph disturbed the silence of the night, and echoed in the young man’s heart with an anguish which made him take it for the groan of a dying man. He opened his door softly and in the passage saw a line of light under old Goriot’s door.

 

Source: Balzac, Honore de. Old Goriot. Translated by Crawford, Marion Ayton. Penguin Books.