Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy

Hazan (Paris in Turmoil), founder of book publisher La Fabrique, presents a transportive study of the 19th-century French novelist Honoré de Balzac’s relationship with Paris. Hazan notes that Balzac got to see much of the city during his peripatetic life, which saw him move frequently between neighborhoods in an effort to stay one step ahead of creditors, who sought repayment after his printing business failed in 1828, and even publishers, whom Balzac had sold purportedly finished manuscripts that in actuality “had been barely sketched out.” Offering a detailed portrait of mid-19th-century Paris rooted in passages from Balzac’s magnum opus, The Human Comedy, Hazan suggests that the description of an exiled Polish nobleman’s tawdry mansion, “built of stone decorated like a melon,” is meant to represent “the luxury and bad taste of the nouveau riche established west of the Chaussée-d’Antin.” As well, the various “students, aspiring writers, journalists, artists, [and] dreamy philosophers” who populate the Latin Quarter in Balzac’s fiction attest to the neighborhood’s contemporaneous reputation as the “territory of youth.” Hazan’s scrupulous readings of Balzac bring 19th-century Paris to life, shedding light on the social friction between old money and the nouveau riche that shaped the city in the wake of the 1830 July Revolution. It’s an enchanting literary love letter to the City of Lights. Photos. (June)