THE GIRLWITH THEGOLDENEYESHONORE DE BALZAC

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T R A N S L A T E D B Y C H A R L O T T E M A N D E L L

MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHINGBROOKLYN, NEW YORK

F I R S T P U B L I S H E D I N 1 8 3 5 I N T H E C O L L E C T I O N , H I S T O R Y O F T H E T H I R T E E N

M E L V I L L E H O U S E P U B L I S H I N G1 4 5 P L Y M O U T H S T R E E T B R O O K L Y N , N Y 1 1 2 0 1

W W W . M H P B O O K S . C O M

I S B N : 978-1-61219-085-3

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T O E U G È N E D E L A C R O I X , P A I N T E R

One of the most appalling spectacles that exists isundoubtedly the general appearance of the Parisianpopulation, a people horrible to see, gaunt, sallow,weather-beaten. Isn’t Paris a vast field constantlywhirled around by a hurricane of vested interestsbeneath which a monsoon of humans swirls about,whom death reaps more frequently than it doeselsewhere? And aren’t these humans always rebornjust as tense as before, their faces contorted andtwisted, divulging from every pore the thoughts,desires, and poisons their brains are obsessed with?Not faces, but masks—masks of weakness, masksof strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy, all of them exhausted, all imprinted

with the indelible signs of a panting greed. Whatdo they want? Gold? Or pleasure?

Some observations about the soul of Paris mightexplain the causes for its cadaverous physiognomythat has only two ages—youth or caducity: a pallid,colorless youth, or a feeble decrepitude caked withmakeup that tries to look young. Seeing this disin-terred population, foreigners, if not enjoined toreflect, first of all experience a feeling of disgust forthis capital, this immense workshop of sensualpleasures, which they themselves will soon nolonger be able to leave, and where they will willinglyremain to deform themselves. Few words suffice togive a physiological explanation for the almost hellish complexion of Parisian faces, for it isn’t onlyin jest that Paris has been called a hell. Take thisword literally. Here, everything smokes, burns,gleams, boils, blazes, evaporates, goes out, catchesfire again, scatters sparks, crackles, and is consumed.Never before has life in any country been more fiery,or more ardent. The nature of this society that isalways melting and reforming seems to say to itselfafter every work is finished, “Now on to the nextone!”—just as Nature tells herself. Like Nature, thissocial nature concerns itself with insects, flowers ofa day, trifles, ephemera, and also hurls fire andflames out from its eternal crater. Perhaps before we analyze the causes that produce a physiognomy

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peculiar to each tribe of this intelligent and mobilenation, we should point out the general cause thatstains, blemishes, bruises, and darkens individualsmore or less accordingly.

By dint of taking an interest in everything, theParisian ends up being interested in nothing. Sinceno emotion predominates on his worn-out face, itturns grey as the walls of the houses, which haveaccumulated every kind of dust and smoke. In fact,indifferent today to what will intoxicate him tomor-row, the Parisian lives as a child does, no matter howold he is. He complains about everything, consoleshimself for everything, makes fun of everything, forgets everything, wants everything, sampleseverything, takes everything with passion, abandonseverything without concern—his kings, his con-quests, his fame, or his idol, bronze or glass alike—in just the same way that he discards his stockings,his hats, and his fortune. In Paris, no sentimentalattachment keeps things from being thrown away,and their constant movement makes for a strugglethat relaxes passions: Here love becomes desire, andhatred a vague impulse. Here one has no relativesexcept the thousand-franc note, and no other friendbut the pawnbroker. This general lack of concernbears fruit accordingly: Thus in the drawing room orin the street, no one is superfluous, no one isabsolutely useful or absolutely harmful—idiots and

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rogues as well as men of wit and integrity. Hereeverything is tolerated, the government and theguillotine, religion and cholera. You can always fitinto this world, you can never disappoint it. What isit, then, that rules in this world without customs,without beliefs, without sentiment, but where allsentiments, all beliefs, and all customs originate andterminate? Gold and pleasure. Take these two wordsas your lamp and travel all through this great plastercage, this black-streaming beehive, and follow theserpentine twists of the thoughts that agitate it, lift it up, shape it. Look. First of all examine thepeople who have nothing.

The worker, the proletarian, the man who useshis feet, his hands, his tongue, his back, his armalone, his five fingers in order to live. This onemore than anyone else should economize on hisvital principle, but instead exceeds his strength,yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his childand harnesses him to a wheel. His boss, the manu-facturer, a sort of subsidiary string whose jerksmove the workers, who with their dirty handsshape and gild porcelain, sew suits and dresses,temper iron, cut timber, forge steel, spin hemp andyarn, polish bronze, etch crystal, trace flowers,embroider wool, tame horses, plait harnesses andbraids, trim copper, paint carriages, pollard old elms,steam cotton, treat cloth with sulfur, cut diamonds,

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buff metals, slice marble into slabs, polish stones,fashion thoughts, color, bleach, and dye every-thing—well, this subsidiary power has come topromise to this world of sweat, willpower, study,and patience, a high salary, either for the sake ofthe city’s fashions, or on behalf of the monsternamed speculation. So these primates have setthemselves to keeping watch, suffering, working,swearing, fasting, walking; all of them have gonebeyond their own abilities, to earn this gold thatbewitches them. Then, heedless of the future,greedy for pleasure, relying on their arms as thepainter does on his palette, great lords for a day,they throw their Monday’s earnings into cabarets,which form a belt of mud around the city; a girdleof the most shameless of Venuses, continually puton and taken off, where the periodic wealth of thispeople is lost as at gambling, a population as fiercein pleasure as it is calm at work. For five days, then,no rest for this active part of Paris! It gives itself upto impulses that warp it, make it gain weight, loseweight, turn pale, burst into a thousand spurts ofcreative willpower. Then its pleasure, its repose isa wearying debauchery, sallow of skin, black andblue from slaps, pallid from drunkenness, or yellowfrom indigestion, which lasts only two days, butwhich steals the future’s bread, the week’s soup,the wife’s dresses, the baby’s swaddling clothes,

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all in rags. These men, undoubtedly born to behandsome, for every living creature has his relativebeauty, have enlisted, from early childhood, in thearmy of strength, the reign of the hammer, shears,spinning-machines, and have quickly vulcanizedthemselves. Vulcan, with his ugliness and hisstrength, is indeed the emblem of this ugly, strongnation, unequalled in mechanical intelligence,patient during working hours, terrible one day acentury, inflammable as powder-shot, and preparedfor the blaze of the revolution by brandy, spiritedenough to catch fire from a specious word that, for this nation, always means: gold and pleasure!And including all those who hold out their handsfor alms, for legitimate salaries, or for the fivefrancs spent on all the various species of Parisianprostitution, or in fact for any rightly or ill-earnedmoney, this people numbers three hundred thousandindividuals. Without the cabarets, wouldn’t thegovernment be overthrown every Tuesday?Fortunately, on Tuesday, this people is dulled, hasslept off its pleasure, has not a penny left, andreturns to work, to dry bread, stimulated by a needfor material reproduction that has become a habit forit. Nonetheless this people has its virtuous qualities,its Renaissance men, its unknown Napoleons, whoare the classic examples of its strength carried to its highest expression, and who embody its social

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possibilities in an existence where thought andmovement are combined less to imbue it with joythan to limit the effects of its suffering.

Fate made the workman thrifty, favored himwith thought, which enabled him to set his mindtowards the future; he meets a woman, finds he hasbecome a father, and after several years of severehardships starts a little dry goods store, rents ashop. If neither sickness nor vice stops him dead inhis tracks, if he has prospered, this is an outline ofhis normal life.

Let us first of all salute this king of Parisianactivity, who has mastered time and space. Yes, hailthis creature composed of saltpeter and gas, whogives children to France during his laboriousnights, and during the day multiplies his person forthe service, glory, and pleasure of his fellow citizens.This man has solved the problem of being sufficientall at the same time for a loveable wife, his house-hold, the paper Le Constitutionnel, his office, theNational Guard, the Opéra, and God; but he is sufficient so that he can turn all of them intomoney—Le Constitutionnel, the office, the Opéra,the National Guard, his wife, and God. Let ussalute this irreproachable multi-salaried worker.Awakened every day at five o’clock in the morning,like a bird he has crossed the space that separates hishome from the Rue Montmartre. Despite thunder

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or wind, whether it’s raining or snowing, he is at theConstitutionnel and waiting for the load of paperswhose distribution is his responsibility. He receivesthis political bread with eagerness, takes it and carries it away. At nine o’clock in the morning, he isback home, joking with his wife; he steals a big kiss from her, swallows a cup of coffee or scolds hischildren. At quarter till ten, he is at the town hall.There, seated on his desk chair like a parrot on hisperch, kept warm by the city of Paris, he inscribesthe deaths and births of the whole arrondissement,without sparing a tear or a smile for them, until fouro’clock in the afternoon. The happiness andunhappiness of the neighborhood pass under thenib of his pen, just as the spirit of the Constitutionnelhad traveled earlier on his shoulders. Nothingweighs him down! He always goes straight in frontof him, picks out his patriotism ready-made fromthe paper, contradicts no one, shouts or applaudswith everyone, and lives like a swallow. Just astone’s throw from his parish, he can, in the eventof an important ceremony, yield his desk to a super-numerary, and go sing a requiem under the pulpitof the church, where he is, on Sunday and feastdays, the finest ornament, the most imposing voice,and where he energetically twists his wide mouthas he booms out a joyous Amen. He is a precentor.Freed at four o’clock from his official service,

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he appears in the heart of the most famous shop inthe city to spread joy and cheer. Happy is his wife,since he doesn’t have time to be jealous; he israther a man of action than of sentiment. So as soonas he arrives, he teases the girls at the register,whose lively looks attract many a customer;delights at the finery, the scarves, the chiffon tailored by these skilful workers; or, even moreoften, before having dinner, he serves a customer,copies out a page of his cashbook, or sends theprocess-server to harass a delinquent debtor. At sixo’clock every other day he is faithful to his role: A steady bass-baritone in the chorus, he can befound at the Opéra, ready to become a soldier, anArab, a prisoner, a savage, a farmer, a ghost, thehoof of a camel, a lion, a devil, a genie, a slave, ablack or white eunuch, always expert at showingjoy, pain, pity, surprise, at letting out the requisitecries, at being quiet, at hunting, fighting, at repre-senting Rome or Egypt; but always, to himself, heis just a haberdasher. At midnight, he once againbecomes a good husband and man, a tender father,he slips into the conjugal bed, his imagination stillpreoccupied by the seductive forms of the nymphsat the Opéra, so that the world’s depravities and La Taglioni’s voluptuous dances all work for the ben-efit of conjugal love. Finally, if he sleeps, he sleepsquickly, and hurries his sleep just as he has hurried

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his life. Isn’t it movement that makes man, man whois space embodied, the Proteus of civilization? Thisman sums up everything: history, literature, politics,government, religion, military arts. Isn’t he a livingencyclopedia, a huge atlas, continually at work, justlike Paris, which never rests? He is all legs.

No physiognomy could keep itself pure in theservice of such labors. Perhaps the worker who diesold at the age of thirty, his stomach tanned by pro-gressive doses of his eau-de-vie, will be found, in thepronouncement of some prosperous philosophers,to be happier than the haberdasher is. One dies allat once and the other little by little. From his eightjobs, from his shoulders, from his throat, from hishands, from his wife and from his business, thehaberdasher derives, as if from so many farms,some children, a few thousand francs, and the mostlaborious happiness that has ever refreshed theheart of a man. This wealth and these children, orthe children who are everything to him, becomeprey to the superior world, to which he brings hismoney and his daughter, or his lycée-educated son,who, more learned than his father, aims his ambitionshigher. Often the youngest son of a little retailerwants to be something in government.

This ambition raises our attentions to the secondlevel of the Parisian spheres. Climb up one leveland go to the mezzanine; or come down from the

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attic and stay on the fifth floor; either way, you enterthe world that has something. Wholesale dealers andtheir helpers, employees, people who use small-business banks and have great probity, rogues,damned souls, high and low clerks, assistants to thebailiff, the solicitor, the notary public, finally theactive, thinking, speculating members of this lowermiddle class who handle the interests of Paris andwatch over its grain, supervise its foodstuffs, storethe products made by the proletariat, pack thefruits of the Midi, the fish of the ocean, the winesof every hillside kissed by the sun; who stretch outtheir hands to the Orient and take shawls scornedby the Turks and Russians from it; who go all theway to the Indies to harvest crops, go to bed earlyto await sale, long for profit, discount their wares,circulate and collect all currencies; wrap up all Parisand sell it retail, wheel it in, are alert to any childishwhim, spy out the caprices and vices of maturity,squeeze profit from disease. Even so, withoutdrinking eau-de-vie like the workman, and withoutgoing to wallow in the mud of the city gates, theyall thus overtax their strength; overstretch theirbodies and morale, the former by means of the latter; desire dries them up, and they become lostin precipitate hurry. In them, physical torsion isaccomplished under the whip of self-interest,under the scourge of ambitions that torment the

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elevated worlds of this monstrous city, just as thefortune of the proletariat is carried out under thecruel pendulum of material production ceaselesslydemanded by the despotism of the aristocrat’s Iwant it. Here too, to obey this universal master,pleasure or gold, you have to devour time, squeezetime, find more than twenty-four hours in the dayand night, overwork, overdo everything, kill yourself,sell thirty years of old age for two years ofunhealthy rest. But the worker dies in the hospital,when his last period of withering away has expired,whereas the man of the lower middle class persistsin living and continues to live, but enfeebled: You will find him with a worn-out, flat, old face, dulleyes, weak legs, dragging himself along the boule-vard—the girdle of his Venus, his beloved city—with a vacant look. What did this member of thebourgeoisie want? The saber of the NationalGuard, his dependable stew, a decent plot in thePère-Lachaise cemetery, and for his old age a littlegold legitimately earned. His Monday is Sunday;his relaxation is a spin in the delivery van, a picnicin the country, during which his wife and childrenjoyously swallow dust or roast themselves in thesun; his excursion is to some restaurant renownedfor its poisonous dinners, or some family ball whereyou suffocate till midnight. Some simpletons aresurprised at the St. Vitus’s dance that seems to

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afflict the molecules seen through a microscope ina drop of water, but what would Rabelais’Gargantua say, figure of a sublime misunderstoodaudacity, what would this giant say, fallen from thecelestial spheres, if he were to amuse himself contemplating the movement of this second levelof Parisian life, one of whose formulae is presentedhere? Have you seen those little shacks, cold insummer, with no other hearth than a foot-warmerin winter, beneath the vast copper dome that topsthe wheat market? Madame has been there sincemorning, she is manageress at the market and earnstwelve thousand francs per year at this profession,they say. When Madame gets up in the morning,Monsieur goes into an ill-lit back room, where hemakes short-term loans to merchants in his neigh-borhood. By nine o’clock he is at the passportoffice, where he is one of the chief clerks. At nighthe’s at the ticket-office of the Théâtre Italien, orany other theater you like to name. The childrenare left in the care of the nanny, and later on theyare sent to high school or boarding school.Monsieur and Madame live on the fourth floor,have only one stove, host dances in a twelve-by-eight-foot room illumined by oil lamps; but theygive 150,000 francs to their daughter’s dowry andretire at the age of fifty, when they begin to appearin the third-tier boxes at the Opéra, in a fiacre at

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Longchamp, or in faded raiment, every sunny day,on the boulevards, the carefully tended fruit of allthese labors. Respected in the neighborhood, well-regarded by the government, allied to theupper middle class, Monsieur obtains the Cross ofthe Legion of Honor at sixty-five years of age, andhis son-in-law’s father, the mayor of an arrondisse-ment, invites him to his soirées. These labors of anentire lifetime thus benefit the children whom thislower middle class inevitably tries to lift to theupper middle class. Thus each sphere throws itsentire spawn into the sphere above it. The son of therich grocer is made a notary, the son of the lumbermerchant becomes a magistrate. No cog misses itsappointed groove, and everything stimulates theupward mobility of money.

Now we have reached the third circle of this hell,which might someday find its Dante. This thirdsocial circle is a kind of Parisian stomach, where theinterests of the city are digested and where the crowdof attorneys, doctors, notaries, lawyers, businessmen,bankers, wholesale merchants, speculators, and magistrates are condensed in the form called businessaffairs, and where the mass is moved and stirred upby an acrid and venomous intestinal agitation. Heremore than anywhere else are encountered causesfor physical and moral destruction. Almost all thesepeople live in squalid dens, in reeking courtrooms,

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OTHER TITLES INTHE ART OF THE NOVELL A SERIE S

BARTLEBY THE SCRI VENER / HERMAN MELVILLETHE LE S SON OF THE MA STER / HENRY JAMES

M Y LIFE / ANTON CHEKHOVTHE DE VIL / LEO TOLSTOY

THE TOUCHSTONE / EDITH WHARTONTHE HOUND OF THE BA SKERVILLE S / ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

THE DE AD / JAMES JOYCE FIRST LOVE / IVAN TURGENEV

A SIMPLE HE ART / GUSTAVE FL AUBERT THE MAN WHO WOULD BE K ING / RUDYARD KIPLING

MICHA EL KOHLHAA S / HEINRICH VON KLEISTTHE BE ACH OF FALE SÁ / ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

THE HORL A / GUY DE MAUPASSANTTHE E TERN AL HUSBAND / F YODOR DOSTOEVSKY

THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED HADLE YBURG / MARK T WAINTHE LIF TED VEIL / GEORGE ELIOT

THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN E YE S / HONORÉ DE BALZ ACA SLEEP AND A FORGE T TING / WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

BENITO CERENO / HERMAN MELVILLEMATHILDA / MARY SHELLEY

STEMPENYU: A JE WISH ROMANCE / SHOLEM ALEICHEMFRE YA OF THE SE VEN ISLE S / JOSEPH CONRAD

HOW THE T WO I VANS QUARRELLED / NIKOL AI GOGOLMAY DAY / F. SCOT T FITZGERALD

RA S SEL A S, PRINCE ABYS SINIA / SAMUEL JOHNSONTHE DIALOGUE OF THE DOGS / MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

THE LEMOINE AFFAIR / MAR CEL PROUSTTHE COXON FUND / HENRY JAMES

THE DE ATH OF I VAN ILY ICH / LEO TOLSTOYTALE S OF BELK IN / ALEX ANDER PUSHKIN

THE AWAKENING / K ATE CHOPINADOLPHE / BENJAMIN CONSTANT

THE COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS / SARAH ORNE JEWET TPARN A S SUS ON WHEELS / CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

THE NICE OLD MAN AND THE PRE T T Y GIRL / ITALO SVEVOL ADY SUS AN / JANE AUSTEN

JACOB’S ROOM / VIRGINIA WOOLF

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TITLES IN THE COMPANION SERIES THE CONTEMPORARY ART OF THE NOVELL A

THE PATHSEEKER / IMRE KERTÉSZTHE DE ATH OF THE AUTHOR / GILBERT ADAIRTHE NORTH OF GOD / STEVE STERNCUSTOMER SERVICE / BENOÎT DUTEURTREBONS AI / ALEJANDRO Z AMBRAILLUSION OF RE TURN / SAMIR EL-YOUSSEFCLOSE TO JEDENE W / KEVIN VENNEMANA HAPPY MAN / HANSJÖRG SCHERTENLEIBSHOPLIF TING FROM AMERIC AN APPAREL / TAO LINLUCINELL A / LORE SEGALS ANDOK AN / NANNI BALESTRINITHE UNION JACK / IMRE KERTÉSZ

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