[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 .)
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The movie-makers faced inevitable challenges adapting Balzac's kinetically evolving 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 achieve this in a movie? In both the 1943 and 1994 movies, the Ferrauds are placed up front, the female lead is shown to the audience and her present insecurities dramatized. It's an understandable rejigging, but it sacrifices 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: a disfigured half-dead revenant, without hair or teeth or eyebrows, unrecognizable by his former acquaintances, 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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On returning to his private room, he [Derville] found the Colonel in a towering rage, striding up and down.
“In those times a man took his wife where he chose,” said he. “But I was foolish and chose badly; I trusted to appearances. She has no heart.”
“Well, Colonel, was I not right to beg you not to come?—I am now positive of your identity; when you came in, the Countess gave a little start, of which the meaning was unequivocal. But you have lost your chances. Your wife knows that you are unrecognizable.”
“I will kill her!”
“Madness! you will be caught and executed like any common wretch. Besides you might miss! That would be unpardonable. A man must not miss his shot when he wants to kill his wife.** —Let me set things straight; you are only a big child. Go now. Take care of yourself; she is capable of setting some trap for you and shutting you up in Charenton. I will notify her of our proceedings to protect you against a surprise.”
The unhappy Colonel obeyed his young benefactor, and went away, stammering apologies. He slowly went down the dark staircase, lost in gloomy thoughts, and crushed perhaps by the blow just dealt him—the most cruel he could feel, the thrust that could most deeply pierce his heart—when he heard the rustle of a woman’s dress on the lowest landing, and his wife stood before him.
“Come, monsieur,” said she, taking his arm with a gesture like those familiar to him of old. Her action and the accent of her voice, which had recovered its graciousness, were enough to allay the Colonel’s wrath, and he allowed himself to be led to the carriage.
“Well, get in!” said she, when the footman had let down the step.
And as if by magic, he found himself sitting by his wife in the brougham.*
“Where to?” asked the servant.
“To Groslay,” said she.
The horses started at once, and carried them all across Paris.
“Monsieur,” said the Countess, in a tone of voice which betrayed one of those emotions which are rare in our lives, and which agitate every part of our being. At such moments the heart, fibres, nerves, countenance, soul, and body, everything, every pore even, feels a thrill. Life no longer seems to be within us; it flows out, springs forth, is communicated as if by contagion, transmitted by a look, a tone of voice, a gesture, impressing our will on others. The old soldier started on hearing this single word, this first, terrible “monsieur!” But still it was at once a reproach and a pardon, a hope and a despair, a question and an answer. This word included them all; none but an actress could have thrown so much eloquence, so many feelings into a single word. Truth is less complete in its utterance; it does not put everything on the outside; it allows us to see what is within. The Colonel was filled with remorse for his suspicions, his demands, and his anger; he looked down not to betray his agitation.
“Monsieur,” repeated she, after an imperceptible pause, “I knew you at once.”
“Rosine,” said the old soldier, “those words contain the only balm that can help me to forget my misfortunes.”
Two large tears rolled hot on to his wife’s hands, which he pressed to show his paternal affection.
(from Le Colonel Chabert, in the translation by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell.)
* Balzac wrote: le coupé. The Countess would have used a grand coupé, with two forward-facing seats inside, and the coachman outside. "Brougham" is anachronistic for 1817, the date of the action. It was a similar but more compact English variant introduced in 1838.
** I can't help wondering if Emerson was unconsciously channelling this, when he said to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr (reportedly): "I read your piece on Plato. Holmes, when you strike at a king, you must kill him." The underlying thought, though not the expression, goes back to Macchiavelli. Balzac was widely read in the USA; Emerson mentions or quotes Balzac several times. Le Colonel Chabert (as The Countess with Two Husbands) was available in English translation from 1837.
So Chabert, whose outburst has just made the Countess' eyes glow like a tiger's, comes moodily downstairs and falls into precisely the kind of trap that Derville has just predicted. But it feels more like a fairytale rescue; the rustle of a dress, being whisked off in a coach; as if the frightfulness of the last ten years had simply been cancelled.
It's an incredibly moving scene. Is this a love story? I think what really makes Chabert break down is the recovery of his identity, the fact of his wife acknowledging him, this momentary restoration of his past.
The emotion is about that, more than his wife herself. Chabert was evidently a devil with the ladies before his disfigurement. Now he loves her (and hates her), but the intensity is because of her prolonged refusal to know him, not because of their shared past. And yet the familiar gesture of her taking his arm begins the triggering of his emotion. Evidently the hot-tempered Chabert was always susceptible to her. Even back then -- given where he picked her up -- he must have known in one corner of his mind that she was acting. He knew it and he didn't mind.
Is the Countess moved too? That's for each reader to decide. The paragraph beginning "Monsieur" is tricksy. Each time I read it it seems at first to claim an ultimate genuineness in her soul's expression, in defiance of all the contra-indications. The line between performed emotion and real feeling isn't always distinct. She intends to take everything from him, certainly. But obtaining things from him was what he always liked. Maybe this was how she loved him.
And for now the pair are united in reviving the familiar act. It isn't easy. The Countess has to work very hard to put a credible gloss on her years of ignoring him. Chabert, likewise, is working hard to keep down his doubts. He wants to inhabit his old identity, so he wants his old illusion.
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— Allons ! encore notre vieux carrick !
“Hullo! There is that old Box-coat again!”
The clerks identify repeat visitors by some feature of their appearance.
The carrick, a long coat with cape collars (at least one, often more) originated in Britain as a coat for coachmen, suitable for the wind and weather on the outside of a coach. But it soon became standard outerwear for gentlemen too, and remained so through much of the nineteenth century. In Britain it was also known as a Garrick or box-coat.
What attracts the clerks' mockery is not the type of coat but its being so shabby, greasy and frayed. It's evidently second- or third-hand, and hence Godeschal's argument that its wearer must be a porter.
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| Raimu as Colonel Chabert wearing the old carrick. |
[Image source: https://www.ebay.com/itm/186699059993 . A 1943 Danish movie program. In the 1994 movie Gérard Depardieu wore a long dark coat, but it wasn't a carrick.]
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:
https://www-bbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-36725501.amp?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a9&usqp=mq331AQIUAKwASCAAgM%3D#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17331339910944&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fuk-england-36725501
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.):
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/27/745104831/declared-dead-at-war-he-returned-alive-to-find-his-world-had-moved-on-without-hi
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.
Biography of Pierre Chabert (1770 - 1839):
In contemporary literature the motif of the lost soldier who comes back had a vigorous existence. Compare Balzac's own Philippe de Sucy in his 1830 story "Adieu". Another military revenant was General d'Archambeau in Éléonore, anecdote de la guerre d’Espagne en 1813, an anonymous novel of 1826 that Balzac had certainly read.
The motif persists in popular fiction today. In a novel I read recently, Klar Himmel by Kristin Fägerskjöld (2020), the wartime colleague that the heroine passionately loved and mourned turns up several years later; in the meantime she's made a sensible if unpassionate marriage and is a mother. She needs to make him accept that their time has irrevocably passed, her commitment is now to her family and excellent husband.
As Kristin Fägerskjöld shows, the wife's dilemma is in many ways the natural centre of interest. In Balzac's story the colonel is presented as a man of integrity and generous, simple feelings; his wife as coldly unscrupulous. But it wouldn't have taken much to present the story quite differently; to cast the hero as blindly driven by self-importance and by merely legal claims to a position and fortune he was lucky ever to obtain; his wife as someone who is both realistic and selfless, determined to protect her family and marriage from this eruption out of her remote past.
Groslay.
The Countess' country house is 15km north of Paris.
Mais où allons-nous ? dit le colonel en se voyant à la barrière de La Chapelle.
A former tollgate on the northern edge of Paris (the site is now Place de La Chapelle), on the road to Saint-Denis.
au dépôt de mendicité de Saint-Denis...
Mendicity means begging. The dépôt was in an old and insalubrious leather factory in Saint-Denis, north of Paris. Inmates had to work for their keep. The death-rate was appalling. As Balzac says, there was no release unless you could prove you had means.
Charenton.
A 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 in Balzac's story of the enlightened practices introduced at Charenton by the Abbé de Coulmier, e.g. the lenient treatment of the Marquis de Sade. ]
Bicêtre.
Another asylum, on the southern edge of Paris. This one had a mix of inmates, the aged and feeble as well as the insane.
How Chabert came to Bicêtre is left in the dark. Perhaps he was moved there because he was too feeble to earn his keep at Saint-Denis.
Alternatively, perhaps it was connected with Chabert's undisclosed letter. Chabert might have agreed to live permanently as a nameless pauper at Bicêtre if the Countess made the arrangements. Necessarily there would be costs, including the repayment of Derville's advances; the pauper could not be a debtor. On his part Chabert would escape being sent to Saint-Denis because he wouldn't be a vagrant any more. On her part the Countess would feel more secure with Chabert at Bicêtre than simply out of her sight; it would remove the threat that he might one day reappear. Maybe she felt just a trace of compunction, too.
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Textual history of Le Colonel Chabert
The textual history of Le Colonel Chabert is confusing. The first publication was in 1832 as La transaction. (The transaction is the out-of-court settlement that Derville tries to arrange; of course neither his draft, not Delbecq's more punitive one, end up being agreed.)
Then came a substantially revised version, titled La Comtesse à deux maris, in 1835. More revisions occurred in 1839 and 1844, when the story finally appeared under its present title, being placed in Scènes de la vie Parisienne.
Early versions can be checked here (you need to view it on a laptop, really):
https://variance.unil.ch/honore_de_balzac/le_colonel_chabert/comparaison/1chabert1832-2chabert1835
Balzac wrote a final round of revisions onto his 1844 copy:
https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/%C5%92uvres_compl%C3%A8tes_de_M_de_Balzac_Sc%C3%A8ne/6XgOAQAAIAAJ?gbpv=1
Le Colonel Chabert was moved to Scènes de la vie privèe in 1845.
French text (without Balzac's final revisions):
https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Colonel_Chabert
French text (with Balzac's final revisions):
https://www.lire-des-livres.com/le-colonel-chabert/
English translation by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1954/pg1954-images.html
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The Conclusion.
The concluding scene went through significant changes.
In 1832, the scene is described as taking place in 1830. Derville's companion is the narrator himself. (So the scene is narrated in the first person.)
In 1835, 1839, and 1844 the scene is described as taking place in 1832. Derville's companion is an unnamed young lawyer who has taken over Derville's practice. (Derville's powerful closing reflections were added in 1835.)
In his final round of revisions Balzac pushed the date back again, this time to 1840. Derville's companion and the inheritor of his practice is now named as Godeschal. (Balzac adds Godeschal's final remark, about Desroches' office.)
I suppose the reason for these changes was to fit in better with other parts of the Comédie Humaine, actual or projected. But making Godeschal the companion wasn't an entirely happy idea. This Godeschal appears to have no knowledge of Chabert's story, though in the earlier scenes he had been closely involved. Likewise his remark about the Countess de Ferraud -- "agreeable, but rather too pious" -- sounds like a young man (such as the companion in previous versions) who has only known the Countess in her later years. But Godeschal wouldn't be a young man at this date, and we know he had seen the Countess in her prime.
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This is the copy I read, found at a motorway services in France. I left it behind in Spain, and can't remember if there was any information about the jacket illustration, in which the Countess prepares for battle.
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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:
Sarrasine (1830):
Le Colonel Chabert / Colonel Chabert (1832):
"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):
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):
The Lily of the Valley (1835):
Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées / Letters of Two Young Married Women (1842):
Le Cousin Pons / Cousin Pons (1847):
Labels: Honoré de Balzac
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