Honoré de Balzac: The Lily of the Valley (1835)

Prunus 'Tai-haku' beginning to bloom, in a strangely peaceful Swindon

The countess gave me those dumb thanks that break a youthful heart ; she gave me the look that she kept for her children ! After that blissful evening, she always looked at me when speaking to me. I cannot describe the state I was in upon leaving. My soul had absorbed my body, I weighed nothing, I was not walking at all, I was flying. I could feel that glance within me, it had inundated me with light, just as her Adieu, monsieur ! had reëchoed in my heart the harmonies contained in the O filii ! O filiae ! of the paschal resurrection. A new life was dawning for me. Then I was something to her ! I fell asleep amid swathes of purple. Flames passed before my closed eyes, pursuing each other into the darkness like the pretty worms of fire running after one another over the ashes of burnt paper. In my dreams, her voice became something indescribably palpable, an atmosphere which enveloped me in light and perfume, a melody which caressed my imagination . . .   (The Lily of the Valley, p. 90)

[Page references are to The Lily of the Valley in the Caxton edition (1897). The Caxton translations were anonymous -- a gigantic labour that seems to have kept its secret.]

O filii et filiae is an Easter hymn composed by the Franciscan Jean Tisserand (d. 1494). Sung here by the choir of Notre Dame de Paris:

Le Lys dans la Vallée  (The Lily Of The Valley, 1835)

It's one of the big books of the Comédie Humaine, -- I even saw a stray remark that it was Balzac's own favourite -- but I don't know of any modern translations into English and it's hard to see from what quarter new readers might emerge in any quantity. I feel very lucky to have read it (in a copy "borrowed" from the shelves of Caffe Nero). Forgive me continuing to ruminate on that reading, fully conscious that I can hardly expect much acquaintance with this particular dusty old book.

She lived there, my heart was not deceiving me : the first castle that I saw upon the slope of a plain was her dwelling. When I sat under my walnut-tree, the tiles on her roof and the panes of her windows were sparkling in the noonday sun. Her muslin gown was the white spot that I could see among the vines beneath a peach-tree. She was, as you already know, without knowing anything further, the LILY OF THIS VALLEY where she was growing for Heaven by filling it with the perfume of her virtues.   (p. 33)

So, first and trivially, Balzac's title had nothing to do with the plant Lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis), the bulb that carpets northern woods and suburban front gardens, its fragrance first synthesized in 1956 by Dior and subsequently popular in the soaps and eau de colognes of Bronnley, Yardley, etc.

[Image edited from https://www.bronnley.co.uk/product/lily-valley-triple-milled-soap-3-x-100g/ .]


However Balzac certainly did have in mind the biblical passage that probably suggested the plant-name:

Je suis la rose de Saron et le lis des vallées.
Comme le lis au milieu des épines, telle est ma bien-aimée parmi les jeunes filles. (Ostervald, Le Cantique des Cantiques 2:1-2)

I am the Rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. (KJV, Song of Solomon 2:1-2)

One evening, I found her musing gravely before a sunset which, while showing the valley as if it were a bed, was so voluptuously reddening the heights that it was impossible not to listen to the voice of that eternal Song of Songs with which Nature incites her creatures to love. Was the young girl reviving her lost illusions? was the woman suffering from some secret comparison? I thought I saw an abandon in her attitude favorable to first confessions . . . (p. 85)

(Théophile Gautier, indeed, described The Lily of the Valley as the Song of Songs of the Comédie Humaine.)

A narcotic flower-arrangement of the erotic and the spiritual hangs over the story. Henriette de Mortsauf, the target of Félix's pursuit, is evidently conceived as a lily of the large and white sort, a Madonna Lily (Lilium candidum).

Lilium candidum

[Image source: https://www.easytogrowbulbs.com/products/lilium-candidum-madonna-lilly .]

As for the valley... , this aristocratic wife and mother who comes to delight in wearing white dresses for her younger admirer hardly ever leaves her chateau of Clochegourde, in the exquisite valley of the Indres, south-west of Tours. (Balzac based Clochegourde on the early 17th-century Manoir des Vonnes, just north of Pont-de-Ruan.)

Manoir de Vonnes, woodcut by Ferdinand Dubreuil

[Image source: http://www.lysdanslavallee.fr/en/file/dsc05864jpg#.Xn8XqPn7TIU .]

The intriguing autobiographical elements of this particular Balzac novel, and its potential as a touristic magnet for the Indres valley, haven't been altogether neglected.

This all makes it sound rather idyllic, and for long stretches it is, specifically but not exclusively in the imagination of Félix de Vandenesse. But it's also tragic and even horrible. Balzac contrives to deposit us, at the end, in a state of deep uncertainty about the correct interpretation of the long, slow, polished and heavily scented narrative we seemed to share with our narrator.

Mothers' Day Tulips given away free by M&S

French text: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Lys_dans_la_vall%C3%A9e
English translation, by Katharine Prescott Wormeley:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1569/1569-h/1569-h.htm
An entertaining (if tendentious) summary of the story, by Jim:
https://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/the-lily-of-the-valley-by-honore-de-balzac/

A couple of books that discuss The Lily of the Valley.

Bill Overton, The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in Continental European Fiction, 1830-1900 (1996).

Discusses The Lily of the Valley in fruitful apposition to contemporary novels by George Sand, Flora Tristan and others. Technically the novel's main relationship, never consummated, can't be adultery; yet it lingers on every note of that keyboard except for the physical one it aches for: "as completely one as jealousy could desire, but without any earthly bond" (pp. 137-38). (Félix's other relationship, with the Englishwoman Lady Arabella Dudley, is flagrantly adulterous and ferociously, even monomanically, sexual.)

I sometimes reflect that when Balzac invented the overarching format of the vast Comédie Humaine, there was a price to pay for this marketing device. It can result in individual Balzac novels being considered too narrowly, i.e. purely within a Balzacian echo chamber, and not as key interventions in an even vaster cultural enterprise, the western novel.

That said, my second book is more or less a revel in pure Balzac, though still with a lot of awareness of Flaubert, Zola, Proust.... This is the historian Anka Muhlstein's Balzac's Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré Balzac (originally published in French as Garçon, un cent d'huîtres, Balzac et la Table (2010)). She points out the regular association of food and sex in Balzac, so underscoring the symbolism of Henriette's dreadful death by starvation.

Field Wood-rush shortly before flowering

Anka Muhlstein calls The Lily of the Valley "Balzac's most complex novel", which is quite a strong statement given the competition, but complex it certainly is.

Nevertheless it's never likely to be the most popular or the most esteemed. Sometimes it's quite indifferent to realism; for instance Félix under the walnut-tree happening to guess, correctly, the very house in which the woman of his dreams happens to live). Cruel misfortune is sometimes varied by absurdly prodigal luck; the huge wealth that suddenly comes to the impoverished Mortsaufs, or Félix suddenly rising from obscurity to become one of Louis XVIII's most powerful civil servants. In this novel, Balzac is not bothered about describing or seriously accounting for these transformations. Much of what we think of as the essence of Balzac's genius is absent; there is no bourgeoisie, no shady business affairs, amoral ambition or unscrupulous predators. The chief characters are all aristocrats and analysis of society as a whole is minimal. Paris and Parisians scarcely feature; how different the story might have been if the teenage Félix had succeeded in his plan to sample the pleasures of the Palais-Royal (p. 21). Nor is there any of the thrilling action of, say, The Black Sheep or A Murky Business or Cousin Pons; the story moves slowly, more through feeling than through drama, and we may feel -- in the unanticipated epilogue -- that Countess Natalie's dismissive response scores quite a few direct hits ("You are sometimes boring and bored, you call your sadness by the name of melancholy ... when you have composed a few sentimental phrases ..." (p. 419)). And it distances Balzac, a bit, from some of the sexist stereotypes in Félix's ruminations on Henriette and (especially) Arabella.

And yet our sense persists that Félix's tale opens up something much larger and stranger than the understandably nettled countess (his current mistress) is willing to recognize.

Natalie's fleering is after all drastically reductive (even if getting out of Félix's clutches may strike us as a good idea). We soon get her measure. One of the many aspects of the story she affects to ignore is the cruel treatment that both Félix and Henriette suffered as children. But though she doesn't mention it she's certainly understood it, and can't resist doing some bullying on her own account.

[Of Henriette and her mother] "In order to form any idea of this struggle between a hard, cold, calculating, ambitious woman, and her daughter, full of that sweet, moving kindness which is inexhaustible, you must picture the lily, to which my mind has ever compared her, ground between the wheels of a polished steel machine." (p. 130)

A glassy Small Celandine

Henriette's husband, the unbalanced Comte de Mortsauf, apparently had contracted syphilis in the past and transmitted its effects to the couple's sickly children. I missed that aspect until I read it in other people's accounts of the novel, but it's fairly clear when the following three passages are brought together:

During dinner, I remarked, in the depression of his withered cheeks and in certain looks secretly bent upon his children, traces of vexatious thoughts the outbursts of which died away upon the surface. Seeing him, who is there that would not have understood him ? Who would not have taxed him with having fatally transmitted to his children those lifeless bodies?  (pp. 58-59)

A few pages later, Balzac sketches the past history of this aristocrat during the Exile...

The count's French and Touraine gayety gave way ; he became morose, fell ill, and was tended through charity in some German hospital. His illness was inflammation of the mesentery, often a fatal case, but the cure of which entails variation in the moods, and nearly always causes hypochondria. His amours, buried in the depths of his soul, and that I alone discovered, were amours of low degree, which not only attacked his vitality, but still further ruined it for the future.   (p. 68)

... and then moves forward to his present life at Clochegourde...

... but the birth of Jacques was a thunderbolt which ruined both present and future ; the doctor despaired of the new-born child. The count carefully concealed this decree from the mother ; then he sought medical advice for himself and received a hopeless answer which was confirmed by the birth of Madeleine. These two events, and a sort of inner certainty about the fatal sentence, increased the emigrant's sickly tendencies. His name for ever extinct, a young wife, pure, irreproachable, unhappy at his side, sacrificed to the agony of maternity, without its pleasures ; this soil of his former life from which fresh suffering was springing, struck him to the heart, and completed his destruction. The countess guessed the past by the present and read into the future. (p. 72)

Whatever queasy doubts we might have about the novel as a whole, one of its indisputable successes is the portrayal of Henriette's unhappy husband as a self-pitying, cruel and tormented hypochondriac.

I then became acquainted with all the angles of this intolerable character ; I heard those continual outcries for nothing at all, those lamentations over evils that had no visible existence, that innate discontent which was robbing life of its bloom, and that incessant anxiety to tyrannize which would have led him to devour fresh victims every year. When we went out in the evening, he himself directed the walk ; but no matter where it was, he was always bored by it ; upon his return home, he would lay the burden of his lassitude upon others ; it was his wife's fault for taking him where she wanted to go against his will ; no longer remembering that he himself had led the way, he would complain at being governed by her in the slightest details of life, at not being able to keep a wish or a thought to himself, at being a nobody in his own house. If his harsh words were met with silent patience, he would be annoyed at feeling there was a limit to his power ; he demanded sharply whether religion did not command wives to please their husbands, whether it was decent to slight the father of her children. He always ended by attacking some sensitive chord in his wife ; and, when he had made it ring again, he seemed to taste a pleasure peculiar to these domineering ciphers.  (pp. 135-36)

... from this plant

Here is Félix musing on the pattern of his relationship with Henriette as it settled into its most stable form:

Every hour, from moment to moment, our fraternal marriage, founded on confidence, became more coherent ; we were both settling down into our positions ; the countess enfolded me in fostering care, in the white draperies of a wholly maternal love ; whilst my love, seraphic in her presence, became, when away from her as scorching as a red-hot iron ; I loved her with a double love which alternately darted the thousand arrows of desire and lost them in the sky where they died away in impenetrable ether. If you ask me why I, young and full of ardent longings, continued in the delusive expectations of platonic affection, I will confess to you that I was not yet man enough to molest this woman, always in dread of some calamity with her children, always expecting an outburst, or stormy variation of mood from her husband ;  wounded by him, when she was not being worried by the illness of Jacques or Madeleine ; seated at the bedside of one of them when her husband, being pacified, allowed her to take a little rest. The sound of too intense a word agitated her very being, a desire shocked her; for her, it had to be veiled love, strength mingled with tenderness, in fact all that she herself was to others.                Then, I will tell this to you who are so thoroughly womanly, this situation allowed of the delightful languors, the moments of heavenly sweetness and the content that follow tacit sacrifices. Her conscientiousness was contagious, the persistence of her devotion without earthly reward was imposing ; this deep, secret piety, which served as a link to her other virtues, acted all around like some spiritual incense. Then I was young! young enough to repress my nature in the kiss which she so rarely allowed me to imprint  upon her hand, the back only of which she ever gave me and never the palm, the boundary perhaps where for her began sensual voluptuousness. If ever two souls were more intensely bound up together, never was the body more fearlessly or victoriously subdued. (pp. 132-33)

There's a certain complacency in Félix's contemplation of his and Henriette's mutual sacrifice, of this apparently stable plateau with its fascinations and tremblings. With all its torment, this love completely satisfies him for the time (though afterwards, once living away from his beloved Henriette, it doesn't take too long for him to succumb to the voracious Arabella). He believes, without thinking too much about it, that not only the sacrifice but the satisfaction is mutual.

It's only on her death-bed that Henriette will reveal that she had always secretly wanted him to push her further, to seize her hungrily, to rip away the principles that are killing her. If Félix had only been more forceful, she might have lived!

The Henriette that says this is in extremity, her identity is breaking apart, so she may not be truthful about what she really wanted back then, it may be just a cry of rage and pain, an agonizing fantasy of what in hindsight she wishes had happened. Re-reading the earlier part of the book, we tend to think that the dying Henriette is forgetting the full complexity of how things were; that they couldn't honestly have been any different, that Henriette knew she had to maintain a spotless reputation in order to be able to nurture her sickly children; and that Félix was hardly more than a boy, that she was a great aristocrat, how could he have rescued her, how could he do more than share her sorrows?

But whatever, Balzac's vision of love is of a symbiosis that always conceals an element of parasitism. No love is truly of equal satisfaction to both partners; always, the apparent plateau is being sustained because one of the partners is giving something up, accepting something less than they ideally want. This most precious era of Félix's life, though it is the source of all Henriette's joy, is also sealing her fate.

Veronica hederifolia ssp. lucorum

Some of the most intoxicating pages in The Lily of the Valley describe the bouquets that Félix lovingly prepares, and which express in an incredibly intricate language of flowers his sentiments to Henriette.

No declaration, no proof of mad passion could have had stronger contagion than these flower symphonies, in which my deluded desire led me to exert the efforts that Beethoven conveyed in his notes ; profound inward searchings, tremendous soarings towards the sky. Madame de Mortsauf was no one but Henriette at sight of them. She would ever return to them, and feast upon them, she would answer all the thoughts I had placed in them when, in order to accept them she raised her head from her tapestry frame, with: "Good Heavens, how beautiful that is!"  (pp. 144-145)

But did Henriette really "answer all the thoughts I had placed in them", was it really possible that she should divine all the "delicious correspondence" that Félix placed in his arrangements? Or did she exclaim at something else, things that she saw in the flowers and in Félix, things that he himself hadn't tried to convey and was perhaps not even aware of? The Lily of the Valley asks that question, how deeply lovers can ultimately know each other.

*

The Lily of the Valley apparently owes a good deal to Sainte-Beuve's Volupté, published just a year earlier. Nevertheless, I'm sure it's reasonable to call it a seminal text for Flaubert and Proust, in particular its method of proceeding by elaborate set-pieces rather than intrigue.

If the section about the flower symphonies is perhaps the most staggering of them, there are others that cry out for more attention than I can give in a single post. Henriette's extraordinary letter of advice to Félix starting out in society is one; another is the fifty days and nights in which they watch over the ill count, sharing their assiduity, even competing in it, and never allowing themselves to know that his death would instantly solve all their problems.


*


Henriette's eventual rival is an Englishwoman. Lady Arabella provides the excuse for, I think, a quite revealing picture of the English, from Félix's perspective.

You know the strange personality of the English, that proud impassable Strait, that chilly Saint-George's Channel which they put between themselves and the people who have not been introduced to them ; humanity seems to be an ant-hill upon which they tread ;  of their kind they only know those whom they receive ; as for the others, they do not even understand their language ... (p. 283)

Whatever she does or says, England is materialistic, perhaps unconsciously. She has religious and moral pretensions, in which the divine spirituality, the catholic spirit is missing, the life-giving grace of which can never be replaced by any hypocrisy, no matter how well simulated. She possesses in the highest degree the science of existence which improves the least particles of materialism, which makes your slippers the most exquisite slippers in the world, which gives an indescribable savor to your linen, which lines the cupboards with cedar and perfume ; pours out at a certain hour a fragrant tea, skilfully laid out, expels the dust, nails down the carpets from the first step to the furthest recesses of the house, brushes the walls of the cellars, polishes the door-knocker, eases the carriage springs, which makes of matter a nourishing, mealy pulp, conspicuous and clean,  in the midst of which the soul dies of satiety, which produces the terrible monotony of well-being, furnishes an unthwarted existence, stripped of all spontaneity, and which, in a word, mechanizes one. (pp. 288-89)

Arabella's love was

A horribly ungrateful love, which laughs over the corpses of those it has killed ; a treacherous love, a cruel love which is like English policy, and in which almost all men perish. (p. 289)

Balzac wasn't necessarily being serious, or no more so than when he writes elsewhere about the German character, but these were evidently the Anglophobic stereotypes of the time. (Napoleon made similar allegations in his bulletins.)