Honoré de Balzac: Le Colonel Chabert
[Image source: Wikipedia . Poster for René Le Hénaff's 1943 movie, with Raimu in the title role.]
Le Colonel Chabert is only a novella, not one of the big cornerstones of La Comédie humaine, but I have the impression that it's one of Balzac’s most read books, in particular by French-speaking students. Its hundred pages constitute a brilliant sampler of major Balzacian themes and techniques, and its tale continues to resonate: the dead hero from a time gone by, who returns to find the world has changed and no-one wants him back. It's been filmed several times: René Le Hénaff's 1943 movie, with Raimu in the title role, is the most admired. (NB, You can watch it in full here .)
French text:
https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Colonel_Chabert
English translation (adequate though far from ideal) by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1954/pg1954-images.html
First published in 1832 as La transaction, it went through several revisions and changes of title before reaching its definitive version in 1844. (The transaction is the out of court settlement that first Derville and then Delbecq try to arrange.)
The 1832 text can be checked here, though not easily if you are using a smartphone:
https://variance.unil.ch/honore_de_balzac/le_colonel_chabert/comparaison/1chabert1832-2chabert1835
The concluding scene was originally dated 1830 but was shifted to 1840; I suppose because Balzac had subsequently given Derville a role in other stories (e.g. Le père Goriot) and felt compelled to delay his retirement from the law.
Incidentally, in the first version of the concluding scene Derville's companion was not Godeschal but the narrator Balzac himself, who reports it in the first person. Godeschal inherited the narrator's prior ignorance of Chabert, rather inappropriately since he had played a joke on Chabert in the first scene.
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The movie-makers faced inevitable challenges adapting Balzac's dynamic text. He delays until halfway through before introducing us, via one of his absorbing but leisurely commentaries, to the Countess de Ferraud and her situation. How to convey this in a movie? In both the 1943 and 1994 movies, the Ferrauds are placed up front, our female lead displayed to the audience and her present insecurities dramatized. It's understandable, but it sacrifices some of the mystery of Balzac’s opening and its abject client.
In fact neither movie really attempts to give us the protean, uncanny Chabert of the novella; a double or treble image: disfigured half-dead revenant, a shuffling tramp broken by humiliation and habituated to derision; simple, humble, grateful and feeble; and simultaneously a glorious war hero, fiercely conscious of his former brilliant position in the military and in the world. The reader's image of Chabert keeps restlessly changing, we can't resolve it. Raimu in 1943 and Gérard Depardieu in 1994 are hampered by the concreteness of their star quality. They compel our gaze from the start. You would never think of throwing bread pellets at them!
So both movies rather misrepresent one of Balzac’s most persistent themes: the terrible and wonderful stories that lurk behind shabby and unremarkable appearances.
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Eylau. The scene of Chabert's "death" was a brutal but inconclusive battle against the Russian army, fought on 7-8 February 1807. It came to be seen as a turning point, the end of Napoleon's era of invincibility, presaging the more mixed success and bloodier encounters that would characterize his later campaigns. But one heroic episode stood out amid the depressing slaughter of Eylau; Murat's famous cavalry charge, which rescued the French centre from imminent collapse. In Balzac's story Chabert is instrumental to Murat's triumph. The "dead" Chabert is thus an undimmed symbol of Napoleon's glory days.
Man and beast went down together, like a monk cut out of card-paper.
La bête et le cavalier s’étaient donc abattus comme des capucins de cartes.
The monk should be "monks" -- well, actually "friars" --, and even then I needed a bit more explanation. The expression refers to a child's game that involved folding and cutting playing cards so as to produce small figures that resembled robed and hooded capuchins. The figures were then lined up close together so that one fall would trigger a general collapse.
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| Toppling capuchins |
[Image source: this informative article by David Graham Mitchell:
https://davidgrahammitchell.substack.com/p/capucins-de-cartes?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web .]
Chabert. He may have been partly suggested by the Général Jean-Joseph Ange d'Hautpoul, who would likely have been appointed a Marshal of France if he had not died at Eylau.
Balzac’s innovation was to combine this high-status death with the immemorial (and sometimes true) tales of less prestigious soldiers who reappeared years after being supposed dead.
WW1 soldiers who returned after being reported dead:
Walter Dixon: a real-life Chabert from the Korean War. When he eventually returned after incarceration in a N Korean camp, he found his wife had remarried and had a child. (She and her first husband got divorced.):
There was also a real Colonel Chabert who served under Napoleon; a colonel in 1809, later a general. But it's only his surname and age that resembles Balzac’s hero.
Charenton. The lunatic asylum in SE Paris. In Le Colonel Chabert it's simply "that terrible name", the threat of confinement that the hero rightly fears. There's no hint here of the enlightened practices introduced at Charenton by the Abbé de Coulmier, e.g. the lenient treatment of the Marquis de Sade.
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One of my long-time blogging heroes, Guy Savage, writes about Le Colonel Chabert:
https://swiftlytiltingplanet.wordpress.com/2012/11/21/balzac-nailed-it/
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My posts about Balzac:
Labels: Honoré de Balzac
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