Train to Sussex

 07:27. It moves off while I'm still settling my guitar in the overhead rack. Gosh we're not fucking about, I think, the bad language merely my excitement. This time, I managed to pick up a Costa Express on the way to the station. It was dark when I left home, but now the light's growing.

I've already checked the paper (Portugal v Uruguay, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Twa Corbies) and wish I hadn't. It isn't the topics, it's the medium, that feels like a corruption.

Next, the daily Duolingo stint, while the train moves mistily through Wiltshire fields. 

Nu så är det jul igen, jultomten myser,

Julegran och klappar han skickar så snäll.

In i minsta koja nu julljuset lyser,

Alla äro glada på julaftons kväll.

Now it's Christmas again, Santa smiles,

Christmas spruce and presents he sends so kindly.

In the smallest hut now the Christmas candle shines,

All are glad for Christmas Eve.

I've brought my copy of Sjung Svenska Folk! so that I can sing this song with my mum, to Alice Tegnér's charming melody. 

It begins as a Christmas song, but it doesn't know when to stop, and ends up being both funny and sad. 

Kära jul, välkommen, välkommen till jorden!

Nu den långa hösten är slut för i år.

Med dig kommer snön och lyser upp Norden,

Sen så få vi påska och så blir det vår.

Dear Christmas, welcome, welcome to the earth!

Now the long autumn is over for this year.

With you the snow comes and lights up the North,

Then it's Easter and then comes spring.

Och så kommer sommarn, då grönt är i skogen, 

Smultronen de rodna, och åkern blir gul.

Men i höst, då skörden är inkörd på logen,

Då vi önska åter: Ack, vore det jul!

And then comes summer when it's green in the forest,

The wild strawberries redden and the fields become yellow.

But in autumn, when the harvest is brought into the barn,

Then we wish again, Ah, if only it were Christmas!

Also in my backpack is the Bulverhythe Variations by Elaine Edwards, a recent purchase that I'm bringing to show my sister (who lives in Bulverhythe). There's a performative aspect to these family visits. I'm wearing clothes that they've given me, so that they can "see them on". It's a bit silly, but it isn't wrong. Because of our European trip I haven't seen them since the beginning of September. And I'm coming to tell them that I'm starting a job next week. 

It's 09:05, the train has reached Basingstoke, and I'm reading a chatty verse epistle by Rubén Darío. He's reached Majorca, and has just described George Sand as "la vampiresa", though he can't remember if she was here with Musset or Chopin. (I suddenly remember that Chopin and Sand are the subject of Donald McLeod's programmes this week, and wonder if I might listen to them on BBC Sounds, but I certainly won't.) 

Sand has it seems always attracted this kind of abuse. I recently read an article about the book she wrote about Majorca, a very bad one apparently. I only know her Indiana, a brilliant novel. 

The verse epistle (Epístola a la Señora de Leopoldo Lugones) was published 7 January 1907, perhaps all written in Majorca in late 1906, as proposed by Vicente Sanz García here: https://buscarubendario.blogspot.com/2019/07/epistola-la-senora-de-lugones.html ; he calls it "el menos modernista de sus poemas".

In Ch LXI of La vida de Rubén Darío: Escrita por él mismo (1913), he wrote more diplomatically of "la inspirada y cálida hembra de letras y su nocturno y tísico amante" (the inspired and warm female of letters and her nocturnal and consumptive lover). 

As it happened, Darío would himself reside at Valdemossa in 1915, not long before his death.

Darío writes about everything and everyone, and is rather irresistible. At least half his references are beyond me. In Darío (unlike his contemporary, Galdós) English-speaking culture has an insignificant place, but he switchbacks through the Romance languages with relish. His Spanish is sprinkled with French and Catalan. (He is writing to Madame Lugones.)

Madame Lugones, j'ai commencé ces vers,

en écoutant la voix d'un carillon d'Anvers...

Así empecé, en francés, pensando en Rodenbach, 

cuando hice hacia el Brasil una fuga... ¡de Bach!

En Río de Janeiro iba yo a proseguir 

poniendo en cada verso el oro y el zafir 

y la esmeralda de esos pájaros-moscas 

que melifican entre las áureas siestas foscas 

que temen los que temen el cruel vómito negro.

Ya no existe allá fiebre amarilla. ¡Me alegro!

Et pour cause. Yo pan-americanicé 

con un vago temor y con muy poco fe, 

en la tierra de los diamantes y la dicha 

tropical. Me encantó ver la vera machicha, 

mas encontré también un gran núcleo cordial

de almas llenas de amor, de ensueño, de ideal.

Y si había un calor atroz, también había 

todas las consecuencias y ventajas del día, 

en panorama igual al de los cuadros y hasta 

igual al mejor de lo fantasía. Basta. 

Mi ditirambo brasileño es ditirambo 

que aprobaría tu marido. Arcades ambo.

Madame Lugones, I began these lines

while hearing the sound of bells in Anvers.. 

Thus I began, in French, thinking of Rodenbach,

When I made unto Brazil a fugue... by Bach!

In Rio de Janeiro I was going to carry on

putting in each line the gold and sapphire

and emerald of those bird-flies

that sip honey all through the golden murky afternoons

feared by those who fear the black vomit.

There is no longer yellow fever there. Happy me!

Et pour cause. I pan-Americanized

with a vague fear and with very little faith,

in the land of diamonds and tropical

bliss. I loved seeing the true maxixe,

but I also found a great warm nucleus

of souls filled with love, dreams and ideals.

And if the heat was excruciating there were also

all the consequences and advantages of the day,

in a panorama matching those of paintings and even

matchng the best of fantasy. Enough.

My Brazilian dithyramb is a dithyramb

your husband would approve. Arcades ambo. 

"Anvers" is the Belgian city that we call Antwerp.

Georges Rodenbach, Belgian symbolist novelist. Churchbells are a major motif in his books.

"pájaros-moscas": hummingbirds.

One of the symptoms of a severe attack of yellow fever is blood in the vomit, hence the Spanish name "vómito negro". The slave trade brought the yellow fever virus from Africa to  the Americas.

I suppose the gold hazy afternoons are feared because they bring mosquitoes, carriers of yellow fever.

"pan-americanicé": referring to the strategy of promoting pan-American cooperation, pursued by the USA (James G Blaine). Darío was appointed secretary of the Nicaraguan delegation at the Pan-American conference in Rio de Janeiro (Jul-Aug 1906), as described in Ch LXI of La vida de Rubén Darío: Escrita por él mismo (1913). 

Maxixe (machiche in Spanish): sometimes called the Brazilian tango, a dance invented in Rio de Janeiro in 1868; it later (like tango) became an international dance craze.

Dithyramb: wildly enthusiastic song, originally to Dionysus. (Maybe glancing at the author's liking for alcohol?)

Arcades ambo. From Virgil's seventh eclogue: "Arcadians both"; Darío uses the tag in the usual way, to signify two people with shared tastes.  [Duncan F. Kennedy points out that the idea of Arcadia as the pastoral locus par excellence arose during the Renaissance, not in classical times. He thinks Virgil's unusual emphasis on Arcadia in the Eclogues had something to do with his friend Gallus, and perhaps symbolized the poetic ideals they shared. See "Arcades ambo: Virgil, Gallus and Arcadia", Hermathena No. 143, In honor of D. E. W. Wormell (Winter 1987), pp. 47-59:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23040873 .]

*

I crossed the col in London again, and wondered what the church with the striking spire was. (St John's Waterloo). On the platform at Waterloo East I played them Alice Tegnér's melody.

I'm south of Tunbridge Wells now, and phone reception is becoming intermittent, so this rambling broadcast is now coming to an end without a conclusion, as I always sensed it would.... Bye for now!

George Sand's Indiana

Detail from the oval Charpentier portrait of 1835

The celebrity of George Sand (1804-76) has travelled across both Channel and Pond. But her books haven't, really.  She wrote sixty-nine novels, but Penguin Classics have never published a single one of them .The only book of hers that appeared in that list (briefly, in 1988), was Lettres d'un Voyageur, impressions of  Paris and of time in Italy with Musset.

But I'm showing my age here. Once again it's Librivox I have to thank for introducing me to Indiana (1832), with Mary Herndon Bell doing an excellent reading job. But in younger circles Sand's work (especially this first novel Indiana) is certainly being studied and read, as the numerous reviews on GoodReads testify.

Why wouldn't it be?  Sand was a pioneer feminist and novels like Indiana are way ahead of the Anglophone world in the radicalism of their analysis of marriage and society. Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published sixteen years later, started to come close - and was considered outrageous - though of course it has very little of Indiana's awareness of sexual psychology and behaviour.* Think of the scene, in Chapter 7, where Raymon takes his "dishevelled Creole" (Indiana's maid, Noun) to have intoxicated sex in Indiana's maidenly bed; his erotic enjoyment of the double betrayal, followed the next morning by briefly troubled reflection on his own detestable image.

*

I can't find much info about this portrait on the internet (though it's widely copied) - anyway, it shows Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin) when still a girl, maybe 18-ish. 

*

"Ile Bourbon" is the older name for the island subsequently known as Réunion, where Indiana and Noun were born. As such they are both described as Creole - the term does not in this case imply anything about ethnicity. Later in the novel we visit the colony. Sand's realization of Ile Bourbon is very skilful, but she had never been there, and she took her information from a friend's travel book.

*

George Sand dressed as a man

The best things in the book, probably, concern Raymon and the claustrophobic feeling of Indiana being trapped by his relentless pursuit. As we read, we are impressed again and again by Raymon's actions being natural and unthinking, from his own point of view;  yet ingeniously manipulative, i.e. to us who see Indiana's peace of mind being constantly eroded.

One of the things that makes Sand's analysis so devastating is the credible way in which she persuades us that neither the unprincipled Raymon nor the brutal Col. Delmare are really evil people but, on the contrary, rather ordinary. So the repulsion we experience is not an indictment of imaginary individuals, but of a real society's structures and values.

[Brecht made the same point about his Life of Galileo, urging producers not to present his churchmen as villains. That would only obscure his analysis of how authority behaves. Make them seem like bankers, he suggested.]

Many readers consider that the narrator is portrayed as definitely (not just grammatically) male, and that he expresses patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes that Sand doesn't intend us to accept. I think that this interpretation misses the narrator's irony. You will see that I am taking Sand and the narrator as being essentially the same person. (Perhaps this is because I have been listening to the book read aloud by a woman.)

This interpretation lands me in an apparent difficulty. The Conclusion, which takes the form of a letter to a certain J. Nébaud, is explicitly written by a young gentleman, and recounts his meeting with Ralph and Indiana in the wilds of Ile Bourbon. This young gentleman is presented as sympathetic but conventional and (in his wordy descriptions) a little ridiculous. At one point he seems to show cognizance of, if not take responsibility for, the previous chapter: "Sir Ralph... me raconta son histoire jusqu’à l’endroit où nous l’avons laissée dans le précédent chapitre." - By implication, then, you might assume that he is the narrator of the whole novel. Against this is the Conclusion's headnote, which clearly marks it off as a separate piece of writing.

But it is hard to recognize the novel's narrator in this young fellow. If he now knows nothing of Sir Ralph beyond what he is told by the islanders, how does that square with the earlier narrator's omniscience e.g. about Raymon and his political career, or the discussions between him and Ralph? Besides, isn't it primarily this earlier narrator who voices the book's most unexpected psychological insights? Some examples:

1. How Indiana moves automatically from an ultra-authoritarian father to an ultra-authoritarian husband, the way she repeats her pattern. This is traced in beautiful detail in the passage where it's pointed out that Indiana's sense of slavery is the very thing that Delmare can't stand, though he constantly creates the conditions of slavery. That another woman would "manage" Delmare easily enough.

2. After the affair between Raymon and Noun, whenever a servant speaks of Noun, Indiana notices that soon afterwards he finds himself driven to mention Raymon (though in another connection). The untold secret exerts an unconscious pressure that must be vented. 

3. The inner compulsion that Raymon feels - when he has ceased to love Indiana and has freed himself from her -  to exercise his power by writing a letter that subtly misrepresents their parting and emphasizes the intensity of a love that he doesn't feel. (Indiana "sees through all this".  But it does her no good,  what reason says is irrelevant, the letter does its work anyway.)

I don't know enough about French literature to know how original these kind of observations of behaviour were at the time Sand wrote them down; observations that seem to depend on an awareness of the life of the unconscious and its consistent but often counter-intuitive logic compared to the life of reason. In British literature there is not much of this until, I don't know, Woolf? i.e. when Freud's ideas began to percolate through, almost a hundred years later.

Indiana must be one of the first books to prompt the startling thought that all love is abuse. (Flora Tristan's 1838 novel Méphis would develop this idea further.) This isn't what Sand generally believed (her most famous quote is about how the only worthwhile thing is to love and be loved) but as you read Indiana the thought comes into focus anyway. (For me it continues to resonate disquietingly through the first couple of books of Anna Karenina. The image of Vronsky shimmies and, for a few seconds, is transformed into Humbert Humbert.)

Some commentators have argued that the ending is not happy and that Ralph is as oppressive as Raymon or Col. Delmare. You can understand this. I think Sand meant Indiana's occlusion in the final pages to testify to her power in private life, a power beyond the mundane (inevitably society-coloured) material of narrative. Nevertheless, it's easy to feel in a troubled way that she is merely eclipsed. But whatever the merits of this view, it misrepresents the book, because Ralph is never a wholly credible character in the way that Raymon is, and he is not presented as a case that typifies a corrupt society; in fact he is a sociopath. No, the devastating insights are all around Raymon. In the book's final third, when Ralph starts to become more central to the action, we've said goodbye to all those devastating insights, it's more a matter of emblem, a picture of two troubled souls who can meet each other in love but only by escaping the pressures of civilisation.

[Behind the flight of Indiana and Ralph to Ile Bourbon lies the image of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788); his young lovers grow up idyllically on Ile de France (Mauritius) but their future is destroyed by contact with the corrupt society of France.]

But I'm generalizing a little too much. Sand has one remarkable insight about Ralph, too: she sees how his benevolence and self-abnegation are intimately linked to his egotism: in fact, these elements of his personality all developed at the same time - as the elements of a personality usually do.

What of Indiana herself? The logic of the story tends to emphasize the extent to which she is a passive and innocent victim worn down by those two malign grindstones, her husband and her lover. That makes her sound pitiable but potentially dull. If that was Sand's plan, then she wrote better than she planned. As in (1) above, Indiana is neither altogether passive nor altogether innocent because she has a well-developed victim psychology. And we should not patronize her. She miraculously escapes having sex with Raymon - this was perhaps a sacrifice to convention, avoiding a "ruin" that would be regarded as intolerable in a heroine who is to find happiness - but if the plan began as a sacrifice to convention then Sand makes a virtue of it. She splits her woman victim in two, i.e. into the unfortunate, sensual Noun and the unfortunate, but redeemed, Indiana. One upshot of this is that Indiana emerges as a personality who is psychologically frighteningly intense but is sensually tepid. Her "Creole" innocence can switch into a magnificent literalism that appals Raymon - he takes refuge in feeling bored by her. Indiana finds numerous and quite surprising ways to tolerate, justify, even celebrate, Noun's tragic demise. Though Indiana's character is not the centre of the book's interest, it quite thoroughly transgresses convention.

George Sand, aged 6

* The Brontës' adoption of male pseudonyms was apparently suggested by George Sand's example. It seems likely that Sand's early novels were among the books mentioned by Charlotte as being sent over from Gomersal in 1840. She called them "clever wicked sophistical and immoral" but Charlotte learnt natural French conversation from them and she was certainly influenced by them; perhaps Anne was too.

Honoré de Balzac: Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (Letters of Two Young Married Women)

Renée and Louise

[Image source: https://www.notrecinema.com/communaute/v1_detail_film.php3?lefilm=527347 . Martine Chevallier as Renée de Maucombe and Fanny Ardant as Louise de Chaulieu. From a 1981 French TV "drame sentimental", produced by Marcel Cravenne.]

Librivox.org, again.

For people who share my odd taste for out of fashion and nearly forgotten authors, librivox.org is a treasure-house. The next thing I downloaded was Honoré de Balzac's Letters of Two Brides (Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, serialized 1841, published 1842) - this is wonderland! A Balzac book I didn't know anything about, in audio for my long commuter trip. If that appeals to you and you want to listen to it while you are as innocent of expectation as I was, then don't read on.

*  

To create a break, here's Balzac's Dedication to George Sand:

MÉMOIRES DE DEUX JEUNES MARIÉES.

À GEORGES SAND.

Ceci, cher Georges, ne saurait rien ajouter à l’éclat de votre nom, qui jettera son magique reflet sur ce livre ; mais il n’y a là de ma part ni calcul, ni modestie. Je désire attester ainsi l’amitié vraie qui s’est continuée entre nous à travers nos voyages et nos absences, malgré nos travaux et les méchancetés du monde. Ce sentiment ne s’altérera sans doute jamais. Le cortège de noms amis qui accompagnera mes compositions mêle un plaisir aux peines que me cause leur nombre, car elles ne vont point sans douleurs, à ne parler que des reproches encourus par ma menaçante fécondité, comme si le monde qui pose devant moi n’était pas plus fécond encore ? Ne sera-ce pas beau, Georges, si quelque jour l’antiquaire des littératures détruites ne retrouve dans ce cortège que de grands noms, de nobles cœurs, de saintes et pures amitiés, et les gloires de ce siècle ? Ne puis-je me montrer plus fier de ce bonheur certain que de succès toujours contestables ? Pour qui vous connaît bien, n’est-ce pas un bonheur que de pouvoir se dire, comme je le fais ici,
Votre ami,
de BALZAC.

Paris, juin 1840.


[(Free translation based on my limited French:) - This, dear George, won't add anything to the lustre of your name, which will certainly cast its magic reflection on my book; but this is not calculation or modesty on my part. For I wish thus to testify to the true friendship that has persisted between us through all our travels and absences, in spite of our labours and in spite of the wickedness of the world. These warm feelings, I am certain, can never alter.  The procession of friends' names that accompanies my compositions brings me one pleasure in compensation for all the pain that those numerous compositions has caused me. For they are not without pain:  to give but one example,  the reproaches incurred by my disturbing fecundity... As if the world that stands in front of me were not so much more fecund! But George,  isn't it pleasant to suppose that, one day in the far-distant future, some antiquarian of destroyed literatures is sure to single out from this cavalcade just those great names, those noble hearts, those holy and pure friendships, the shining lights of our era? Can't I be just as proud of that definite prospect as of a literary fame that remains always doubtful? For anyone acquainted with you, what a happiness it is just to be able to style himself, as I do here,
Your friend,
BALZAC.]

*

I don't for a moment think that Balzac's dedication has anything sly about it -- that doesn't fit my idea of his character -- but there are undeniable resemblances between Sand and the character Louise, who is a great and unconventional lover, and (in passing) the cultivator of a Paris salon.

This is a bit of a Librivox blockbuster. Kara Shallenberg and Michelle Crandall take the two leads (Louise and Renée, respectively), supported by a quartet of others for the male characters - Peter Yearsley with a faint Hispanic accent for the sombrely incandescent Hénarez, and David Barnes again, this time cast against type as the fervent 23-year-old-poet Gaston. But this is Kara's and Michelle's book; the former is brilliant as the initially lovable, eventually rather appalling, mocking, hurtful, forgiveable, Louise -- the only challenge she doesn't quite rise to is the total despair of Louise's second calamity; but perhaps Balzac doesn't either... Michelle is (like Renée) at first strictly secondary, then grows in power and authority to the desolating cry of the closing lines.

Balzac is really the most astonishing of novelists -- (yes, even more than Dickens) -- I've read a dozen of Balzac's other books, but I'd never have foreseen that he could also do what he does here. Perhaps this novel, more than most, deserves to be called a "study"; there is little or no intrigue, nothing at all gothic. The most astonishing things, to my eyes, are Renée's accounts of childbirth, infant convulsions (I suppose this is neonatal tetanus, now virtually extinct in the west because of innoculation), and the mother's ecstatic but painful sensations of breastfeeding.

That is, unless the most astonishing thing is Louise's paean to the joys of consummated sex in Letter 27. I am making an interpretation here. Louise says only that she is talking about love, and she spends some time emphasizing that the only true kind of male lover is a man of genius, who understands that love is spiritual more than it is sensual. But the way that the topic emerges, out of the banter about "Moorish perfidy" on their wedding night, implies that she means sexual abandon. At any rate, it is a highly erotic kind of love. Perhaps I'd concede that the over-developed spiritualization of Louise's experience is what in the end destroys her, as she foresees in this very letter. Certainly it's on this plane that she accounts for her enslaving tendencies and her uncompromising jealousy.

As always with Balzac, the ending of the book suddenly steeples and induces a crash of reorientation. The epistolary novel was then a venerable, even outmoded form, but Balzac did new things with it. He did it, in a way, by NOT doing old things. The epistolary novel had tended to involve intrigue in which the characters are always criss-crossing each other and the letters themselves ingeniously become stage-properties, in which much depends on who heard what from whom. But Balzac's two principal correspondents rarely meet and to an apparently large extent get on with their separate lives -- as I said, there's no intrigue, except for a perfunctory little top-knot in the final chapters. Yet this very separation of the correspondents, the long time-gaps, Balzac's resistance to using the letters as plot-devices: all these work together to expose something more interesting about the correspondence.

Contrasted heroines was another cliché of novel-writing (think Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, Rose Bradwardine and Flora MacIvor...). In those earlier novels character contrasts had been merely a piquant fact of life. In Balzac's book we see the contrast coming into existence. The two "sisters" begin to drift down separate paths; each muses on and regrets that contrast repeatedly; each compares herself constantly with the other: envying, sympathising, defending, condemning. At first it seems to them a contrast of circumstance; then it is understood as a contrast of character; but perhaps it is really willed. The more Renée becomes Renée, the more Louise becomes Louise. When the correspondence ends, only then do we realize how much each depended on the other, how each one's conception of herself depended on her conception of her friend, and on her friend's conception of her. In one sense they had drifted apart. In another sense neither can be understood without the other; nor indeed, without the correspondence itself; in those days, letter-writing was the cyborg extension of a literate person's brain.

Louise (Letter 39, the Rome letter): "Rome is the city of love; it is there that passion should celebrate its feast, with art and religion as confederates. "

"Rome est la ville où l’on aime. Quand on a une passion,
c’est là qu’il faut aller en jouir : on a les arts et Dieu pour complices."

Renée (the infant convulsions letter): "My God! by what tortures do you bind a mother to her child! To fasten him to our heart, need the nails be driven into the very quick? Was I not mother enough before? I, who wept tears of joy over his broken syllables and tottering steps..."

"Ô mon Dieu ! par quelles douleurs attachez-vous
l’enfant à sa mère ? quels clous vous nous enfoncez au
coeur pour qu’il y tienne! N’étais-je donc pas assez mère encore,
moi que les bégaiements et les premiers pas de cet enfant ont
fait pleurer de joie!"

As you can see from these quotations, R.S. Scott (who translated the novel back in the 1890s for Saintsbury's 40-volume edition) is a very bold and easy translator: the Librivox readers make the translation sound like a much more modern one; I haven't yet fathomed exactly why that is.

The heroines are not treated quite equally. We are apt to agree with the soundness of Renée's judgments on Louise, but not vice versa. Nothing seriously goes wrong for Renée, she has some of the stillness of a typical figure, representing motherhood (it's when listening to her letters that I tend to think of the novel as a "study"). But is this right? Should we really, for instance, accept Renée's accusation that Louise caused her first husband's death? (That Louise accepts it is neither here nor there.) Was the marriage really so unhealthy? It's true that Hénarez dwindles from a heroic champion of Spanish liberty to a mere society butterfly, but he is happy and highly respected. Isn't the issue partly an economic and political one; that rich exiled nobles don't really have anything significant to do with themselves? As for Renée herself, I would love to know if her behaviour as a mother was typical for the time. She seems unexpectedly modern in her beliefs about bringing up children (which of course I warm to), yet also perhaps a little too cossetingly absorbed in them. And she is frankly materialistic, to the point of being unprincipled, in her pursuit of her family's interests. Balzac does not make these judgments; but his naturalism certainly permits them to come into view.

[This novel is being rediscovered in the Anglophone world. See Morris Dickstein's essay in the NYRB, January 2018:

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/01/09/balzacs-novel-of-female-friendship/

... One of the things I learnt is that Henry James wrote a Preface to a 1902 edition of the novel.]

*

My posts about Balzac:

Sarrasine (1830):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/01/libravoxcom.html

Le Colonel Chabert / Colonel Chabert (1832):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/12/honore-de-balzac-le-colonel-chabert.html

"Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu" / "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1832), "Les Marana" / "The Maranas" (1832), "Un drame au bord de la mer"  /  "A Seashore Drama"  (1834), "L'Auberge rouge" / "The Red Inn"  (1831), "Maître Cornélius" / "Master Cornelius"  (1831):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/03/minor-balzac.html

Le Curé de Tours / The Abbé Birotteau (1832), L’Envers de l’Histoire Contemporaine / The Seamy Side of History (1842-1847), Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau / The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau (1837), La Marâtre / The Stepmother (1848):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/03/honore-de-balzac-1799-1850.html

The Lily of the Valley (1835):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/03/honore-de-balzac-lily-of-valley-1835.html

Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées / Letters of Two Young Married Women (1842):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/02/memoires-de-deux-jeunes-mariees.html

Le Cousin Pons / Cousin Pons (1847):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/04/honore-de-balzac-le-cousin-pons-1847.html