#32 - Gobseck - putrid pies, mouldy fish, nay, even shell-fish, the stench almost choked me.

Some people out on the internet have been saying some nice things about me as a part of Book Blogger Appreciation Week.  Warm thanks and returned appreciation to Jenny and Teresa at Shelf Love and Rebecca Reads.*

To any new visitor not particularly interested in Honoré de Balzac, this post is a poor introduction to Wuthering Expectations.  Last week’s Moby Dick Fantasia may be more typical, but I’m not sure it’s 100% readable.  I would like to direct newcomers, and perhaps everyone else, here (This is what I do) and here (Balzac 101, part 1 – of, maybe 20? I’ve written a lot about Balzac).

Today, I look at the euphonious Gobseck (1830), one of the earliest parts of the elaborate interlocking Human Comedy, written, in fact, when there was no Human Comedy, but later reworked into it.  Retconned, as the comic book kids say.  The long (70 page) story is by no mean top-drawer Balzac, but is of great interest to readers exploring the entire big system.

Or, hang on, maybe it is top-drawer?  Don’t I want to put things in the top-drawer that I don’t use very often, because I have to get the step ladder?  No, that’s top-shelf.  Gobseck is top-shelf Balzac.  This cannot possibly have been my point.

Yes, my point – Gobseck, the story of a Paris usurer and his entanglements with a young lawyer and a Countess, intersects directly with two of Balzac’s greatest books.  The Countess is, in fact, Anastasie Goriot, the older of the two cruel sisters in Père Goriot (1835).  And the usurer, the blood-sucking Gobseck, is in fact – well, never mind who he is, but he is the source of a surprising turn of events in A Harlot High and Low (1839 and later).  Also, the young lawyer shows up in many Balzac stories, including Colonel Chabert (1832), a favorite of mine, and we learn a lot about him here.

The episode from Père Goriot, some nonsense involving the retrieval of some diamonds, makes, as I remember it, no sense at all in the novel.  In fact, I recall a long footnote in the edition I read that tried to explain the scene, which must be how I learned that I needed to look at Gobseck.  I’m not sure how much it matters, since there’s plenty else going on in the book, but I see this as a flaw in Balzac’s scheme.  His interconnections are not always seamless.

Père Goriot is a short novel.  Someone should publish Père Goriot Plus, which would include the full novel followed by the stories Gobseck, The Red Inn (1832), and the essential The House of Nucingen (1838).  They’re all pretty good – Gobseck is the weakest – and would quickly demonstrate how the Human Comedy actually works.

The title of the post is from my favorite scene in Gobseck.  The usurer has died, and is discovered to be the first of Balzac’s chain of marvelous misers (see Eugénie Grandet or the first part of Lost Illusions).  He’s becomes so grasping that, by the end of his life, he even hoards food.  Without refrigeration.  Yuck!

Translation by Ellen Marriage, from the 1897 complete Comédie Humaine.

* And E. L. Fay joins in. Fella could get a swelled head. Thanks!