Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep or, elsewhere, A Bachelor’s Establishment 1842) has elicited no champions, a paucity of fans, and little scholarly interest. Notwithstanding Balzac’s letter to Mme Hanska proclaiming its surprising success, critics, with the notable exceptions of Dorothy Magette and Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, have found the work difficult to appreciate. Even the sympathetic Fredric Jameson regrets that he has no choice but to recognize “the book’s […] structural dissymmetry,” and André Le Breton went so far as to call it “a profoundly repugnant work,” though few others would follow him to such an extreme. 1 Certainly, it cannot be said to resemble those highly regarded creations that pick up and exploit once again the structure Balzac employed to unify the Comédie humaine itself. In such cases, a sophisticated, finely tuned understanding of “image” dispels much of the confusion. What has been called an “image” or “spatial” or “descriptive” structure subordinates all the constituent parts, including plots, to most of Balzac’s visions. As I argued in Balzacian Montage, such patterns or images are particularly significant in explaining how the novelist could emphasize his view of the entire society, rather than the coincidental actions of a particular character. Instead of having importance in and for themselves as isolated elements, such as in popular fictions, his characters and episodes serve as vehicles of significant meaning on the larger stage of the entire novel, of the entire La Comédie humaine, and indeed of the whole French society. When successful, the novelist was able to subsume the narrations of creations like “Gobseck,” or Eugénie Grandet, or Le Père Goriot to a pattern that encourages an instantaneous comprehension of the whole 2 and a deeper understanding of the shape that the modern world was taking. Balzac was not, however, limited to image structure. The novelist was a master of many devices and patterns, and his work is no more tied to a particular technique than to an isolated subject. La Rabouilleuse illustrates a separate category from many of the novelist’s other creations, for its structural coherence and unity depend upon different, though nonetheless effective, devices that reward close reading.

A more adequate understanding of La Rabouilleuse should attract knowledgeable Balzacians as well as a popular audience, for it both continues the author’s socially perceptive description of the July Monarchy and reveals the novelist’s mastery of sequential or process structure. On first reading, it would seem to justify the denigration that Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and other Nouveaux Romanciers regularly heaped on the nineteenth-century novelist. 3 Bardèche more generously says that it is “a novel whose structure is rather strange, though its equilibrium is powerfully and extraordinarily naïve” (6.93). Still, while such masterpieces as La Cousine Bette might justifiably be preferred to La Rabouilleuse, the latter is a work of Balzac’s maturity and well worth attention. In addition, I would differ with Bardèche and suggest that the novel’s sophisticated structure is anything but naïve.

Like most novels that depend on narration, La Rabouilleuse may seem to follow the actions of a central character or group. The narrator mentions, for example, that the people in the area maliciously retained Flore Brazier’s nickname of the Rabouilleuse, which encourages the reader to understand that Flore’s importance is not in herself but in her activity with the fabulous rabouilloir (muddying stick). It seems reasonable to wonder whether there exist other rabouilleurs creating troubled water in society. Indeed, there are. She is merely the first to frighten the poor crustaceans into traps that render them helpless. Max Gilet portrays a similar figure. Not only does he keep extortionate pressure on the several men who erroneously thought they might be his father, he disrupts the Hochon home by corrupting their wards, keeps Issoudun in an uproar with successive pranks, and successfully lures Flore into partially abandoning her role as Jean-Jacque’s kept woman by accepting Max as a new, in-house lover, though without resigning as the mistress of the doctor’s scion and current heir of the Rouget fortune. Despite his mental limitations, Jean-Jacques long remains sufficiently prudent to avoid marrying Flore, since she then would have had limited but legal rights to the Rougon fortune. Max and Flore are consequently unable to break his hold on the inheritance.

Nonetheless, Flore is not the focus of interest, though her role is extremely important. 4 Rather than a picaro of eighteenth-century literature, the advancing focus or nucleus is not a picaresque heroine, since she does nothing of any significance. As a child, by agitating the muddy bed of a creek with her stick, she catches the attention of the crayfish that then feel threatened and scramble upstream. “[I]n their confusion [they] throw themselves in the fisherman’s traps placed at a suitable distance. Flore Brazier held her rabouilloir, her stick for muddying the water, with the natural grace of innocence.” 5 Her primary function is to trouble the water. By creating turbulence that directs the “fish” into the traps, the stick serves like the Rouget fortune to encourage covetous suitors into lethal nets.

The salient feature at the heart of the narration quickly appears to be less a character or even a role than the inheritance proper that passes from Dr. Rouget, to Jean-Jacques, partially and temporarily to Joseph, then, to Flore and to Philippe, and finally to du Tillet and Nucingen, before reverting to Joseph. Unlike fictional creations exemplified by Chateaubriand’s René or Constant’s Adolphe, Flore’s character decreases in importance. She functions simply to represent or symbolize the Rouget family’s assets. However much Jean-Jacques is the titular owner, she is the pretense for all the other main characters who in fact follow the money. Because effective control of the inheritance has passed out of the hands of the legitimate family, her role as representative of the wealth seems a wild card, her value depending on her connection to the various, passing men. How one gains and maintains control of the inheritance is the problem confronting all those attracted to the fortune. Each of Flore’s suitors tries different means. After the doctor’s son, Jean-Jacques, attempts to use the inheritance to maintain her in the role of servante-maîtresse, Max feigns love to gain control of the financial resources, Joseph tries charm and is offered paintings to deflect his interest, and Philippe keeps her subjected through fear until, when Jean-Jacques dies, he marries her himself. At this point, near the end of the novel, Flore passes from the scene, for she no longer holds sway over the inheritance. Philippe, as her legal husband, is now temporarily in control until the fortune eventually falls to the larcenous du Tillet and Nucingen, who focus not on the woman but, with concentrated directness, on the money. Joseph functions as a sort of pilot fish to whom the paintings, like the leftovers of a feast, fall. Although Flore muddies the water, the money is central and awaiting someone clever enough to gather it in.

La Rabouilleuse, then, deploys a highly complex plot armature that leads readers efficiently from first to last page. The term “plot armature” is intended to separate narration into its component parts and emphasize the abstract plot, free of the constituent characters. Aristotle defined narration as a work’s sequence of episodes or plot when animated by a character. La Rabouilleuse emphasizes the sequence, including both direction and quantity, rather than the characters. The “plot armature” of a novel could be compared to a cable that includes any number of strands, that merge, twist, and turn around a central core throughout the story, but most of which do not continue from beginning to end. Names, symbols, mythical, biblical, and historical referents, descriptions, characters, and various themes feed into and around the central vector or core growing in importance as the novel’s significance is constructed and illuminated within the encompassing, ongoing web. The themes are particularly salient, for they have cultural import, and Balzac both emphasizes them and depends upon them to carry the novel’s sense of the surrounding society. But the core fortune retains the focus.

In most narrations, a character or a group of characters make up the sequence of what I just compared to the central vector of a “cable” that merges plot and character, providing an example of Aristotelian narration. For La Rabouilleuse, however, the armature is not a character, but rather a collection of elements that the novel weaves around the inheritance into a developing, encompassing textual cable as it moves from beginning to end and closure. Balzac does not neglect the well-worn means of closuring death to break the progression and end the book. Soon after we have attended the title character’s pathetic illness, the novel follows with her own and Philippe’s deaths. The novelist depends on more interesting devices to fill out the accumulation of signifying elements that are brought in at various points to unify the complex novel as it progresses. As an unusually strong texture is woven around the central sequence of the mobile Rouget fortune, the author highlights what is taking place in families like the Bridaus. The very innovative, literary progression also insists on the society-wide changes occurring in the nation, changes that warn of a dangerous future for France.

The narrator follows the nucleus of the inheritance gained and lost by successive “heirs” as it moves serially through the various characters’ attempts to seize the money for themselves. They act, in short, like free radicals, able to join with differing couples and groups one after the other to advance their own careers and take charge of the nuclear inheritance. These characters generally become a part of a group, though they are essentially alone. To the unifying plot following the inheritance is tied the opposition between Paris and the provinces and a succession of irregular, though not always immoral, couples whose successive coupling and uncoupling emphases the dearth of legal fathers.

At the outset of the novel, the plot-vector opens with Dr. Rouget, a widower who intends to break the fraternal bond between his son Jean-Jacques and daughter Agathe. Mistakenly believing (or pretending to believe) that the girl is the result of his wife’s adultery, he sends Agathe off to Paris and manages her marriage contract so that she will receive nothing at his death. As a result, when Agathe’s overworked husband passes away, she is left in Paris with two sons to raise and insufficient funds. She then establishes a household with her friend Mme Descoings, the widowed wife of the grocer in whose home she had met her husband Bridau. “These two honest but weak creatures” (4.286) set about raising Joseph and Philippe without any help but that of three singularly unimpressive “wise men of Greece” (4.286) who visit them regularly. Clearly, mothering is not enough to protect and guide the children. Nor is the small group of male counselors. Balzac believed that the father was essential in resisting the crumbling society that he sensed surrounding him in the 1830s and 1840s. Philippe becomes a scoundrel (4.304), while Joseph commits himself to art.

Balzac’s narrator repeatedly mentions the way he uses names and the importance of Sterne’s influence on his practice all across La Comédie humaine. The importance he places on these names and their connotations is of even more profound significance in La Rabouilleuse. Several of Balzac’s onomastic choices play more than usual on comparisons to animals. As the “Avant-propos” to the Comédie humaine claims, “Social Species” resemble “Zoological Species” (1.8). Of course, he expands the onomastic possibilities, comparing characters not just to various animals but also to natural objects, like Agathe’s name, a homonym of “agate.” Descoings clearly indicates quinces and Flore, flora. Flore Brazier’s given and family names together further broaden her role beyond that of frightening crayfish into traps with her rabouilleur to that of allurement, for this “flower” attracts a number of creatures into the destructive “brazier” of her passion. The perverted Dr. Rouget and his retarded son bear the name of the red fish known in English as mullet, while the pathological Philippe bears a given name deriving from an etymon for “horse” (which symbolically stresses his physical and soldierly aptitudes). The names may also depend on cultural associations. Balzac twice refers to the very unimpressive elderly counselors that Agathe engages to help her raise her fatherless children as the three wise men of Greece. Certainly, their careers had hardly been successful and their advice seems either inappropriate or decidedly wrong (4.286). Had they numbered seven, in accordance with the Seven Wise Men of Greece, as prescribed by the oracle at Delphos, they might have been more effective. 6 And every time the young Jean-Jacques Rouget’s name occurs, one could well remember that Voltaire famously thought Jean-Jacques Roussseau’s work made him feel like “walking on all fours,” thus facetiously accepting Rousseau’s call to a “state of nature.” Balzac was not enthusiastic about Rousseau either. 7

At the apex of the pyramid within the natural kingdom that can be discovered in the text, from plants to fish to mammals to humanity, there stands Joseph Bridau, whose life has much in common with the biblical Joseph. Theologians consider Joseph a prefiguration of Christ, though Balzac’s Chaudet only mentions the boy’s “election by God” (4.293). Otherwise, French readers of the novelist’s day might have remembered the scriptural son of Rachel and Jacob, who saved his father and brothers from a famine in Canaan (Genesis 37, 39–50). Not only is Balzac’s Joseph falsely accused of a crime, he spends time in prison as did his epigone. His paintings may as well suggest visions resembling Joseph’s Biblical dreams, and, as the latter supported his family in Canaan, so Balzac’s character faithfully provides support for his mother and her friend, Madame Descoings. In addition, because he has “rare gifts” (4.293), he becomes a highly regarded July Monarchy painter.

Aside from being an outstanding painter, able to create beauty, Joseph has the knowledge to recognize and appreciate the true value of the paintings held by the uncultured Rouget clan. Despite considerable opposition, especially from his mother, Agathe, the young man’s steely determination and concentrated focus make him capable of contributing great art to modern society, where few others have such success. His mother believes the career he has chosen to be disreputable, for she shares the disdain that the bourgeoisie had for art, artists, and the artistic. Nonetheless, for Balzac, only an extremely intelligent leader like the biblical Joseph was capable of saving a people and redeeming his terminally ill society. One of the book’s lessons is clearly that youth can save the world, but only if young people are allowed to take their rightful place, a lesson that is more fully developed in a subsequent novel, La Vieille Fille. Balzac’s Joseph Bridau is a genius who like his biblical namesake makes a better future possible. By contrast, Pierrette’s Jacques Brigaut, though not a genius, had tremendous ability as a soldier. Nonetheless, he found no reason to live, and instead sought death on the battlefield. Athanase Granson, an intelligent young man with great potential, actually does commit suicide in La Vieille Fille. Such heartbreaking failures are sprinkled liberally across La Comédie humaine. Rare successes, like Daniel d’Arthez, are also recorded, but they occur so seldom that readers can scarcely doubt Balzac’s anguish for the young people being wasted and, as well, for the future of France.

Occasionally Balzac’s use of onomastics seems idiosyncratic, even playful if not bizarre. Though scholars have regularly sought the explanation for his names in the author’s biography, the choices he makes for his characters usually have more to do with homophony (as with the pair Bette/Bête), with sixteenth-century words and names (like Goriot and la grande Gorre 8 ), or puns (like les cinq Hochon [the five hogs]). In La Rabouilleuse, given Balzac’s love of puns, which he shared with several of his creations like Mistigris, readers should note that finding himself eventually as the Count de Brambourg “often made [Joseph] burst out laughing with his gathered friends” (4:540). He then ends the book with several phonically twisted proverbs, implying that he might be laughing at the homophonous Branbourg or “city of garbage or excrement.” This possibility is rendered more convincing on recalling that the young Chevaliers de la Désœuvrance (Knights of Idleness) had cried out on learning of Agathe’s and Joseph’s imminent arrival, “’Bran for the Bridaus!” (4.383).

Balzac was convinced that only families governed consistently by fathers could control self-centered young men like Philippe and Max. This opinion is widely accepted today, when similar effects are seen on the streets of major cities around the world in the children of one- or no-parent families. David Blankenhorn points out pertinently:

The end of this process, the final residue from what David Gutmann calls the ‘deculturation’ of paternity, is narcissism: a me-first egotism that is hostile not only to any societal goal or larger moral purpose but also to any save the most puerile understanding of personal happiness. In social terms, the primary results of decultured paternity are a decline in children’s well-being and a rise in male violence, especially against women. In a larger sense, the most significant result is our society’s steady fragmentation into atomized individuals, isolated from one another and estranged from the aspirations and realities of common membership in a family, a community, a nation, bound by mutual commitment and shared memory. 9

Balzac recognized that fathers had to a large degree disappeared from French society during the Napoleonic wars. As the novelist put it in La Vieille Fille, “Napoleon’s system of politics […] made many widows” (4.854). That La Rabouilleuse does not mention any fathers might even make one believe that Balzac’s Issoudun completely lacks them. He shows that it is the untutored, the undisciplined, in short the fatherless who illegitimately usurp power and who become the unbridled, self-obsessed Philippe Bridaus and the Maxence Gilets. Ultimately, they destroy society. The novelist repeatedly showed that ungoverned young people lacking in long-term social vision disrupt society and commit their lives to frivolous goals and ideals. For their own and society’s sakes, they need desperately to be put to good use.

The result of a weakened paternity is monstrous, Balzac claims, since it encourages “selfishness […] without limits” (4.271). While it may take a moment to recognize that there is something monstrous in the single-minded commitment of great artists, there is no question that Joseph’s brother Philippe’s selfish plans to make money produce damaging, indeed horrendous, effects in the society at large. The point, as Balzac explains, is that the father is the only social force capable of forming character in his children and of opposing money in its capacity as the most powerful force in society. Money in whatever form has no morality, and is then very dangerous. “May a society based uniquely on the power of money shiver on noting the impotence of justice when confronting the complications of a system that deifies success and condones every means to achieve it!” (4.271). A society without fathers is sterile and results, in short, in Philippe. The implicit lesson is clear. Without the beneficent effects of the sharks Nucingen and du Tillet plundering Philippe’s fortune, the entire family would have ended in disaster. Joseph salvaged the Rouget paintings, at least.

The situation in provincial Issoudun, where a major part of the action is set, warns of what the future holds for all of France. Although, as Armine Mortimer suggests, Napoleon constitutes a symbolic father for Max and Philippe, such abstract paternalism fails to shape sons into useful citizens. 10 Instead of acting regularly according to the Civil Code, society has been reduced to vicious rivalries, perverted strategies, and the stubborn retention of power in the hands of old men. In a better society, ruled by fathers concerned about guiding their sons honorably into useful positions of significance, Max would have been one of those men who can effectively perform momentous tasks (4.492). Like other outstanding young people, Max can simply not “remain in a hole like Issoudun without busying himself at something!” (4.502). Lacking the moral sense that should be instilled by fathers, his activity generated enormous harm and set him up to be killed by the psychopath Philippe, causing the narrator to mourn: “So it was that one of those men destined to do great things perished […], a man […] endowed by nature with courage, calm, and the political insight of a Caesar Borgia” (4.510). Unfortunately, lacking a father, and raised by an unmarried mother, “he did not learn that nobility of mind and conduct, without which nothing is possible in any kind of life” (4.510).

Curiously, none of the novel’s young men behave normally. None wants to marry, for example; they do so only to serve other ends. 11 Jean-Jacques understands that marriage to the Rabouilleuse would cost him control, and Max wants a woman only if she has money (4.501). Prepared by the irregular upbringing of their childhood, the brothers forsake the normal path to marriage, for despite the fact that both eventually have brides, both are in essence bachelors. The fact that Philippe actually marries Flore does not abrogate the pattern, for he uses marriage not for love or for establishing a family and children, but to seize the Rouget fortune and destroy his wife. As further support, Balzac has the traitorous Hochon boys, both of whom are wards of M. Hochon, betray their guardian grandfather to Max and the illegitimate Chevaliers de la Désœuvrance (Knights of Idleness). For many reasons, Balzac believed that the father was essential in resisting and restoring the crumbling society of the 1830s and 1840s.

The novel is set in both Paris and Issoudun, giving the reader reason to expect that it resembles other of the paradigmatic Scènes de la vie de province, in which Balzac will illuminate further differences between Paris and the provinces. Issoudun has characteristics that the author invents, for its onomastic homonym implies another lesson: a society lacking the virile father will eventually self-destruct. The narrator explains: “The word ‘Dun’ is the province of any eminence sanctified by a Druidic cult and seems to specify one that the Celts’ military and religious cult established. The Romans may have subsequently built a temple to Isis on the Dun.” 12 We remember that the Egyptian goddess Isis was married to her elder brother Osiris, who was killed and cut into fourteen pieces by their brother Set. With the help of her sister Nephthys, Isis managed to bring Osiris back to life, having located thirteen of his fourteen parts. The emasculated brother/husband’s genitals were not to be found, however, leaving him impotent. In the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, J. Viaud summarizes the myth: all that is creation and blessing comes from Osiris; all that is destruction and perversity arises from Set (16–20). Osiris has, however, been crucially mutilated. For Balzac, and for those who remember their mythology, the allusion to Isis serves to highlight an important pattern in the La Rabouilleuse: the lack of fathers and the opposition between the rascally Max and Philippe and the good son Joseph.

Balzac was also insisting on the incapacities of mothers, as his preface states clearly. He explained in his dedication to Charles Nodier that he wanted to plumb important lessons “both for Family and for Maternity” (4.271). It seemed to him that the weakening power of paternity had deleterious effects. “However tender and good the mother may be, she no more replaces this patriarchal royalty than a Woman replaces a King on his throne” (in France, of course, Salic law would not permit a woman to ascend to the throne) (4.271). Balzac will return to the theme of poor parenting and substitute mothers even more explicitly in Le Cabinet des antiques.

As in traditional melodrama, which notably fails to make fine distinctions, and perhaps influenced by the success of such popular writers as Dumas père and Eugène Sue, Balzac provided Agathe’s sons with little nuance. Philippe is crude, even brutish, and profoundly depraved, a selfish womanizer, a gambler, a thief, a liar, and, ultimately, a murderer. In short, he is like the evil Richard III who, according to Pierre Citron, was one of Balzac’s models, 13 with no virtue other than “that of the vulgar bravery of a swordsman” (4.297). Joseph, however, loves and cares for his mother; he is kind and quiet, an outstanding painter, though physically ugly. Still, the indulgent Agathe’s continuing, overwhelming love for Philippe led her to undeviating attempts to come to his rescue in a succession of scandals, where she does her best to cover up his crimes and help him put himself back together. Her efforts might remind us of Isis. As the Egyptian goddess worked with Nephthys, so Agathe struggled with Descoings to reform Philippe. Joseph, who understands that Agathe prefers the handsome brother Philippe and cannot really help herself, lovingly refuses to condemn her, while nonetheless recognizing that she is “an imbecile of a mother” (4.357).

In the meantime, the author has extricated Philippe from a murky conspiracy, worthy of a good rabouilleuse’s skills, and sent him to Issoudun. Availing himself of Hochon’s advice, he replaces Max and takes Flore, establishing a new, irregular couple, and reserving the Rouget inheritance for himself. While Flore continues to service Jean-Jacques in a new ménage à trois, there is no question about Philippe’s dominance. He takes them both to Paris where he infects Jean-Jacques and Flore with the pleasures of the demi-monde. It does not take Jean-Jacques long to die of over-indulgence. Flore dies, as well, almost certainly of syphilis, the result of Philippe leaving her in penury and, thus, forcing her into prostitution. Fortified with unimpeded access to the inheritance, Philippe is then free to pursue a marriage of even greater wealth, an attempt that is foiled by Bixiou, before going on to die a lonely, brutal death on a battlefield in Algeria. His brother Joseph, however, like his biblical counterpart, is “the master dreamer” (Genèse 37.19), and like Jacob’s son, he is able to rise from jail and follow his visions to a life of acclaim and fortune.

When the Parisian ladies Agathe and Descoings sink into the depths of poverty, Descoings dies, and Philippe, having been caught stealing from his aunt and brother, is shown the door. The family’s misery is, of course, thanks largely to the latter’s nefarious activity. To conserve their limited funds, Agathe moves in with her son Joseph, and thus establishes another of the novel’s couples, this time a mother–son twosome. Agathe soon takes Joseph with her to Issoudun in an attempt to rectify the earlier paternal rejection and recuperate the Rouget inheritance. There, they join forces with the Hochons, who have a profound understanding of the mores of the people surrounding them in the provincial town.

As the unusual plot sequence, based on corralling the assets of the late doctor’s fortune, follows a winding but nonetheless clear path from Dr. Rouget to Flore to Philippe, to the bankers and, finally, to Joseph, the trail reflects the changes Balzac saw in society. We have learned in other of his novels that the limited, indeed mediocre, rigid, fearful, arrogant, spiteful middle-class people that control society often succeed in crushing outstanding young people like Joseph whom France so desperately needs. In telling the story of the Rouget inheritance pursued serially by a number of characters, one after another, Balzac’s innovative technique exploits a narration composed of a moving target where the wealth serves as the point of focus. The technique of organizing a narration around an object, in this case the inheritance, reflects and, thus, highlights the novel’s significance. The novel is set in a society where neither people nor their moral characters are important. Only money matters.

Among the more significant failures of this society, religion and, more particularly, the church have lost its power. “Not only was the influence of religion nonexistent, the priest enjoyed no respect” (4.362). The narrator assures the reader that the local people enjoyed denigrating the priest by repeating the more or less ridiculous rumors about him and his housekeeper, and he notes the few things remaining from the religion of the ancien régime. There is a school, where children continue to attend catechism classes in preparation for their first communion, and people go to mass. They even celebrate the feast days. But it is all routine, lacking the impact of genuine belief. Given that it indicates lackluster religion and aesthetic blindness, it is not surprising that only one person tries to stop the demolition of the Saint-Paterne Church, one of the nation’s loveliest examples of Romanesque architecture (4.365). Equally serious is the dearth of aristocrats, leaving the town without noble links to the rest of France and the vitality that two opposing classes would provide. Issoudun’s bourgeoisie is proud of its triumph in expulsing nobles, though in truth, combined with rural people’s hatred of change, it is but one more reason for its “complete stagnation” (4.362).

“The decadence of Issoudun is explained then by a spirit of immobility pushed to the point of ineptitude” (4.362). Neighboring Bourges, the former capital of Berry, is much the same (4.362). Local government is so inbred that it is impotent (4.363), and change is impeded. The narrator warns, “Many French towns, particularly in the south, resemble Issoudun.” His tone becomes even more ominous: “The condition caused by the triumph of the Bourgeoisie […] is what awaits the whole of France, even Paris, if the Bourgeoisie continues to be our country’s master of domestic and foreign policy” (4.364). Government is inept, the church is ineffectual, and, as the readers will see in heart-rending detail, the family is broken. Traditional, effective, patriarchal families have been replaced by such irregular couples as two weak women, a perverted old man and a little girl, a retarded son and a servant-mistress, and a mischief-making group under the leadership of a pseudo-father. In such a world, bourgeois mediocrity reigns, leaving an idle group of young people with no social goals and nothing productive to do. Nor does Balzac indicate that there is much hope for future amelioration.

Since the death of Dr. Rouget, who brought the pretty Flore home with the obvious plan of raising her for his private pleasures, Rouget’s retarded son Jean-Jacques continues where his father leaves off and begins an affair with the Rabouilleuse, now the corseted Madame Flore Brazier (4.407). This new, unsavory couple does not stay the same for long. However much the aging Jean-Jacques is willing to lavish her heart’s desire on Flore, he cannot satisfy the young woman, and she adds the former military man and bachelor Maxence Gilet to her bed. Like Philippe, Max’s names suggest both leadership (Maxence) and military prowess (Gilet probably derives from etymons referring to the goatskin that covered shields 14 ). The historical fact that the Roman Emperor Maxence died violently serves to prepare readers for Max’s defeat. Soon Flore moves her new lover, Max, into the Rouget house. She does not dare to reject Jean-Jacques, since the fortune to be enjoyed is legally his, but she very quickly puts Rouget into second place and begins the process of stealing the inheritance. Max, of course, dominates his mistress and, thus, the ménage à trois, leaving him and Flore to face off against the other potential heirs, Agathe and her son, Joseph. Despite the support of Agathe’s godmother, Mme Hochon, and the advice of her wily husband, the Bridaus are not up to the battle. Joseph finds himself incarcerated like his biblical namesake. When freed, he and his mother beat a retreat to Paris, where Joseph pursues his lonely struggle to rise to the heights of the Parisian art world, all the while caring for his mother.

Nicole Mozet points out that Flore serves to focus on the numbers of men that surround her and that are involved in irregular families. A list involves virtually every character in the novel. 15 Dr. Rouget, the father of Jean-Jacques and sister of Agathe, does not live long enough to consummate the relationship he intended with the pretty child he bought from the peasant. Jean-Jacques fills in after the father dies. Then, later, Flore establishes an illegitimate concubinage with Max, which lasts until Philippe kills her lover. Philippe offers another example of misdirection. He successfully integrates himself into the Issoudun society before luring Max to his death and taking Flore firmly under his control. Afterward, it is a simple matter to infect Jean-Jacques with the pleasures of the Parisian fleshpots, rapidly weakening his character and bringing him to his death. Flore finally inherits, though Philippe is waiting, ready to frighten her into marriage, so that he may legally take charge. While he continues after his marriage to hide his intentions, he abandons his new wife to poverty and prostitution. The fact that he is soon back in the military, where he suffers a horrible death, merely means that du Tillet and Nucingen, two other rabouilleurs, have succeeded in slipping behind his defenses and defrauding him of the inheritance. Since Flore is by this time already dead and the nefarious financiers have done their work, the inheritance is reduced to paintings and are free to pass to Joseph, the good brother. The latter’s success and genius are finally crowned by the recognition of his artistic talent, the protection of the Count de Sérizy, a rich marriage, and what is left of the Rouget, now Bridau, inheritance.

The portrait that Balzac paints of the provinces in the preceding Scènes de la vie de province continues and deepens in La Rabouilleuse. Although success in Paris depends primarily on individual initiative, most often of a solitary nature, success in the provinces requires concerted group effort. Those individuals, like du Bousquier of La Vieille Fille and Philippe in La Rabouilleuse, who lack the power to rise to power and wealth in Paris may succeed in the hinterlands. They need to learn to fit in, to present the appearance of having become a part of the provincial scene, an endeavor that usually requires the active help of more knowing provincials like the Hochons. Few things please Balzac’s provincials more than repulsing Parisians. Agathe and Joseph’s flight, for example, “was celebrated by the entire town like a victory of the provinces over Paris” (4.466). They do not understand that they have merely opened themselves up to another Parisian predator, the sociopathic Philippe.

Balzac repeatedly returned to the dangers of a society ruled by money. His infernal vision of Paris at the beginning of “La Fille aux yeux d’or [The Girl with the Golden Eyes]” is merely the best known. He apparently felt that his message gained power when examined in a provincial setting. Although the essentially bachelor nature of the Parisians Henri de Marsay, Nucingen, du Tillet, and Rastignac, among others, is obvious, we expect family to continue to be important in the provinces, where, in fact, in the midst of stultifying inactivity, many of the same social forces are in place and result in the same social maladies as in Paris. Issoudun continues to be repressed by long lived, medieval, bourgeois attitudes. On the one hand, the provincials are committed to wealth and, on the other, afraid of change: “Issoudun’s decadence is explained by a spirit of immobility pushed all the way to ineptitude” (4.361). And, as said before, the story takes place in a patriarchal vacuum. “The town of Issoudun has arrived at complete social stagnation [… It] would have bored Napoleon to numbness” (4.362–63). Religion has no influence at all (4.361), and the administration is so in-grown that one cannot expect any change. “Consequently, the administration’s sluggishness admirably corresponded to the moral and intellectual situation of the country” (4.363).

Naturally, in such a town, “without even commercial activity, without artistic taste, without learned occupations, where everyone stayed in his place” (4.365), bored, idle young people become destructive, forming quasi-families devoted to their own self-centered, often malicious entertainment. By any objective judgment, they have nothing else to do in this society. Issoudun’s community is controlled by undisciplined orphans like François Hochon and his cousin Baruch Borniche, who idealize Max Gilet. The latter becomes Grand Master of the occult Chevaliers de la Désœuvrance, which establishes a kind of corrupt family with Max as a spurious, counterfeit father. Max’s illegitimacy is stressed in that he extorts money from several men his mother was seeing, which goes to pay for orgies at the Cognette’s, and he leads his band in malicious, destructive, illegal pranks. François and Baruch themselves have no real tie to Max other than the thousand écus they owe him, yet are committed members of the group and betray their grandfather because of it. Money, not love, is the key to behavior in this society.

Not surprisingly, Mme Hochon obliges her husband to welcome her sister by threatening to direct her personal fortune away from him (4.421). M. Hochon gains absolute control of his grandsons by threatening to leave them with no inheritance (4.482–85). He wields a weapon of considerable power when he finally exercises the authority of a father over his wards, since, as Piketty notes, this was a period of extremely slow economic growth. Rising to a comfortable lifestyle required a personal fortune beyond the reach of those lacking a substantial sum, like an inheritance. 16 The boys have allowed money to turn them into spies on their own families, so that the pun on the Hochon name (les cinq Hochon or “the five hogs”) becomes all too appropriate. M. Hochon brings them under control by wielding the only weapon they recognize. Another inheritance threatens to go astray, and they quickly come to order.

As usual, Balzac does not force us to guess the sense of his lesson: “The position into which the bourgeois triumph has placed this leading district town is the one that awaits all of France and even Paris, if the bourgeoisie continues to remain the mistress of the internal and external politics of our land” (4.364). Balzac recognizes that young people have been radically mistreated by their elders. Not only have women been virtually deprived of reasonable inheritances, allotting them at best a “minimum” portion, fathers often chose illegal primogeniture for the major portion of the family inheritance, thus disinheriting younger sons and daughters. The significant, widespread riotous behavior of youth during the Revolution was to some degree the result of this unjustifiably partial treatment of the young. Napoleon’s Civil Code consequently became a means of keeping young people in subjection. There was much conflict internally as women and youngest sons tried to gain their rights. They felt they should be treated equally. The older generations, who remembered the troubles of the revolutionary decade acutely, were determined to avoid revolutionary turmoil, and they not only refused to give up their legal power embroidered on the Code; they expanded it to solidify their domination. 17

Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse illustrates that only with geniuses like Joseph Bridau can there be hope for rebuilding a functional society. As the biblical Joseph explains to his brothers: “[I]t was to keep you alive that God sent me before you […], in order to assure you a portion within the country and to allow you to live through a great deliverance” (Genesis 45.5–7). Balzac prophetically exposes France’s sterile mediocrity and stagnation, the consequences of a misguided genontocracy. Without the traditional power of the patriarchy and families both to guide young people and to guard morals, without the force of a strong church, Balzac believed France’s only hope was in outstanding young people, in the Josephs. Of course, even in the case of such paragons, the author’s hope is limited, as he reveals in works like Z. Marcas, Pierrette, and, perhaps most powerfully, in La Vieille Fille. These fictions reveal that in Balzac’s literary critique of contemporary France, the middle-class arranges things so that vital young people have no future short of crime, exile, or death. France then forms an analogy paralleling the Isis myth Balzac perceived in Issoudun. As the reconstituted Osiris lacked his reproductive member, so Restoration and July Monarchy France lacks the virile power of youth raised in a disciplined fashion by fathers within the patriarchy.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Magette, “Trapping Crayfish: The Artist, Nature, and Le Calcul in Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies12.1–2 (Fall-Winter 1983–84) 54–67; Frappier-Mazur, “Max et les chevaliers, famille, filiation et confrérie dans La Rabouilleuse,” Balzac, pater familias, ed. Claudie Bernard and Franc Schuerewegen, Cahiers de Recherche des Institutes Néerlandais de Langue et de Literature Française 38 (Amsterdam: Département de Langues romanes, U de Groningue, 2001) 51–61; Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse,” Social Science Information 16.1 (1977): 64; Le Breton, Balzac: l’homme et l’œuvre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1905) 289.

  2. 2.

    Cocteau has succinctly described what happens when an author succeeds in offering such a structure to readers: “[Y]ou can dream in the space of a second the equivalence of Proust’s work”—Journal d’un inconnu (Paris: Grasset, 1953) 153n1. For more detailed illustrations, see, e.g., Pasco, “Balzac’s ‘Gobseck’ and Image Structure,” Novel Configurations: A Study of the French Novel, 2nd ed. (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1994) 51–71; Allusion (U of Toronto P, 1994; rpt. Charlottesville: Rookwood P, 2002) 211–20; Balzacian Montage (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991) 22–35, and, of course, the current volume.

  3. 3.

    I think particularly of, e.g., Nathalie Sarraute, L’Ère du soupçon: Essais sur le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) 55–56, 60–64, 108–09; Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Une Voie pour le roman future” (1956), Pour un nouveau roman, Coll. Idées (Paris: NRF, 1963) 17–18; Jean Ricardou, “Le Nouveau Roman existe-t-il?” Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd’hui, Communications et interventions du colloque tenu du 20 au 30 juillet 1971 au Centre Culturel de Cerisy-la-Salle, 2 vols. (Paris: 10/18, 1972) 1.20. Michel Butor, a major exception, maintained that those who wished to write anti-Balzacian novels had an insufficient understanding of Balzac—“Balzac et la réalité,” Répertoire [1] (Paris: Eds. de Minuit, 1960) 79–80.

  4. 4.

    Lucienne Frappier-Mazur argues, conversely, “The Rabouilleuse’s two marriages confer a pivotal position on her, which would alone justify the novel’s title”—“Max et les chevaliers” 59.

  5. 5.

    This particular reference is on (4.387). Balzac’s definition of a rabouilleuse has been contested. Rabelais used the term to refer to “un trou, un recoin” (4.1271n1 to p. 386). Consequently, “R. Guignard believes that crawfish don’t throw themselves in the nets, but rather take refuge in holes. This perhaps allows the fisherman to catch them with his hand” (4.1271n1 to p. 387).

  6. 6.

    The Delphic oracle instructed that there should be seven wise men. Balzac’s decision to limit his counsel to three may simply be a way of insisting on their inadequacies.

  7. 7.

    See Dorothy Magette’s excellent discussion of Jean-Jacques Rougon’s figural relationship to Jean-Jacques Rousseau 55–56.

  8. 8.

    Bette is a common nickname for Elisabeth, the title character of La Cousine Bette; bête is the French word for animal. J. Wayne Conner points out that gorre is a word that Rabelais used for syphilis: “On Balzac’s Goriot,” Symposium 8 (1954): 70–71.

  9. 9.

    David Blankenhorn, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem (New York: Basic Books, 1995) 4. For a discussion of fatherless works of art in the nineteenth century, see Pasco, Sick Heroes 168–71.

  10. 10.

    Mortimer, For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 2011) 139–51.

  11. 11.

    George Saintsbury showed considerable insight when he titled his translation of La Rabouilleuse, A Bachelor’s Establishment.

  12. 12.

    4.359. I have found no recent etymologists who would accept Balzac’s etymological embroidery. Albert Dauzat, Les Noms de lieux: Origine et evolution: villes et villages, pays, cours d’eau, montagnes, lieux-dits (Paris: Delagrave, 1963) 73, 102, and André Cherpillod, Dictionnaire étymologique des noms géographiques (Paris: Masson, 1986) 229 agree, simply, that Issoudun derives from the Gallic Uxelodunum or “fort on a height.” The addition of Isis, however, provides the author with a powerful allusion that highlights the damage being done to families.

  13. 13.

    Pierre Citron, “Introduction,” La Rabouilleuse (Paris: Garnier, 1966) lxxxvi.

  14. 14.

    4.383. Charlotte M. Yonge, History of Christian Names (London: Macmillan, 1884) 79–80.

  15. 15.

    Mozet, La Ville de province dans l’œuvre de Balzac: L’Espace romanesque: fantasmes et idéologie (Paris: Société d’Edition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1982) 234–52.

  16. 16.

    Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2014) 238–43.

  17. 17.

    I take this summary from Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004). See, also, one of her very interesting sources, Alain Collomp, “L’Impossible mariage: Violence et parenté en Gelvaudan, XVIIe, XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” ed. Elisabeth Claverie and Pierre Lamaison (Paris: Hachette, 1982) 157–77.