19th century French fiction crammed into one post

What happens next?  The French novel, French fiction as we know it, finally comes to life in a blast of coffee-fueled energy.  Balzac, Sand, Stendhal, Hugo, then Dumas, Flaubert, Verne, and then Zola and Maupassant, just to stick to the most famous, lots of terrific books that are still widely read and have all kinds of continuity with the French fiction written today.

I’ll blast through them myself, just making a few notes about reading them in French.  Heaven knows if you want to know what I think about Flaubert, that is easy enough to find.  Much of this is familiar to anyone who has taken advanced French.  These are familiar writers, familiar texts.

1.  Almost all of these writers are ideally suited for the punishing or educating of French schoolchildren.  They have written texts of a variety of lengths and difficulties allowing all sorts of clever paths connecting this book to that.

Start Balzac with one of his many short stories or novellas, with Colonel Chabert, move up to Eugénie Grandet, end with Père Goriot.  Maybe put that one on the Bac.  I read one of the possibilities in French, “The Elixir of Long Life” (1831), my fortieth work in the Human Comedy, and the first and only in French.  It is a Don Juan story that otherwise goes pretty much where you would guess from the title.

This year, the big 19th century novel on the Bac is Stendhal, The Red and Black.  The standard shorter Stendhal is Vanina Vanini, which I have not read.  Italian stuff.  For Sand, it’s La Marquise (1832), where the title woman is in charge, pursuing the actor she desires, not a masterpiece but an antidote to the masculinity of a lot of French fiction.  For Flaubert, it’s the Trois Contes (1877), or maybe just the first and easiest story, “A Simple Heart.”  What a triumph, when I finished it – I had read Flaubert in French.  And my French was not that good.

2.  So what do we do with Hugo?  His novels are monsters.

First, there is “Claude Gueux” (1834), a heart-wrenching story about a prisoner, friendship, cruelty, the death penalty – distilled Hugo, champion of the powerless.  As art, if that matters, I thought it was better than the propagandistic novella Diary of a Condemned Man (1829).

Second, French pedagogists have carved up Les Misérables (1862) into many books, not just into abridged editions of a variety of lengths, but more curiously into rearrangements of the novel, often focused on specific characters, so that there is Cosette’s Les Misérables and Gavroche’s Les Misérables.  There is a book titled Jean Valjean (A Journey around some Misérables), like it is a city or a park.  One can imagine an entire Hugo-based curriculum.

There is at least one of these for Balzac, too, The Novel of Vautrin, pulling together scenes featuring Balzac’s great proto-superhero character from many novels.

I don’t know that I approve of this butchery, but I am amazed that it exists.  It is an interesting idea, taking a novel like Les Misérables and returning to it from different directions.  I don’t know that any French teacher is really doing this, but the books exist, and are in print right now.

3.  Zola’s short story “Le grand Michu” (1870) surprised me because of its multiple connections to later French fiction, the whole line of French schoolboy stories, and also to Jean Vigo’s 1933 anarchic masterpiece Zéro de conduite.  The riot at the end of Zola’s story is enacted by Vigo and his little maniacs.  No idea if this is in English.

4.  I discovered that I have more to say, or can babble at greater length, about Guy de Maupassant than I had realized, so let’s cut all that and write more about Maupassant some other time.  He is obviously perfect for infliction upon schoolchildren and French language learners.  His French, at least in his newspaper stories, is pretty darn easy.

George Sand's peasants - there is no language in which to express my conception of rustic simplicity

The peasants in The Devil's Pool do not sound much like peasants. They speak in long, flowing paragraphs, like they're in La Nouvelle Héloïse. George Sand apologized for this at the beginning of the marvellous appendix, and returned to the subject a few years later in another short novel, François le Champi / François the Waif (1850).

François begins with a long, curious dialogue between "George Sand" and a friend, which is mostly a dullish argument about the relationship bewteen nature and art. "Sand" says that she is constrained by French from depicting peasants in a truthful manner:

"'No,' I answered, ' for there is no form for me to adopt, and there is no language in which to express my conception of rustic simplicity. If I made the labourer of the fields speak as he does speak, it would be necessary to have a translation on the opposite page for the civilised reader; and if I made him speak as we do, I should create an impossible being, in whom it would be necessary to suppose an order of ideas which he does not possess.'" (Introduction, p. 138)

Sand's friend tells her that she did a pretty good job with the peasants in The Devil's Pool, but could do better. Sand agrees to try again; François le Champi is the result.

"'One moment.' said my severe auditor, 'I must object to your title. Champi is not French.'

'I beg your pardon,' I answered. 'The dictionary says it is obsolete, but Montaigne uses it, and I do not wish to be more French than the great writers who have created the language.'"

There are some things about French literature I will never understand.

Maybe I should say here that although I can recommend The Devil's/Haunted Pool/Pond without reservation, the same is not true of François the Waif, a story of an orphan and his foster mother that is by no means bad, but is pretty thin stuff.

Anybody want to champion other George Sand books? Here's Dorothy W., a couple of years ago, writing about Indiana; she convinces me that it's an interesting period piece, but not much more than that. Are the Consuelo novels good? It doesn't seem right that George Sand is now most famous for her romance with Chopin. But she wrote so many books that are so little read now, it's hard to know what to make of her.

George Sand, party girl - an ancient ceremony held in mockery of theorists

The Devil's Pool is short, only 140 pages in the antique Everyman's Library edition I read. How strange, then to discover that the story ends after just over 90 pages. What's left? An appendix with four chapters: A Country Wedding, The Wedding Favours, The Wedding, and The Cabbage. Even stranger, the appendix is the best thing in the book.

Like Melville in Typee, Sand is using the novel for the purposes of cultural anthropology, capturing the peasant customs before they are gone. "In a year or two more, perhaps, the railroads will lay their level tracks across our deep valleys, and will carry away, with the swiftness of lightning, all our old traditions and wonderful legends."

The wedding guests - the whole village - divide into two parties. The groom's party is led by the grave-digger, the bride's by the hemp-dresser. The groom's party tries to enter the bride's house, first through persuasion, then by a singing contest, then by a mock combat. The couple can only marry once the groom's party place a goose on a spit on the bride's hearth. This is all pretty good - the singing contest is especially charming.

It's that last chapter, though, "The Cabbage," that is genuinely amazing. On the third day of the wedding, a pair of beggars appear, "the gardener and the gardener's wife, and they pretend it is their sacred duty to guard and care for the sacred cabbage." And so begins an hours-long, improvised performance involving the entire village. Some of the pieces are moral lessons - warnings against wife-beating, say, while others are pure comedy. It all concludes with the digging up of a symbolic cabbage. Another character appears, the know-it-all "geometrician," who

"walks up and down, constructs a plan, stares at the workmen through his glasses, plays the pedant, cries out that everything will be spoiled, has the work stopped and begun afresh as his fancy directs, and makes the whole performance as long and ridiculous as he can. This is in addition to the ancient formula of an ancient ceremony held in mockery of theorists in general, for peasants despise them royally..." (App. Ch. 4).

The cabbage is placed on the roof of a barn, and is "a symbol of the prosperity and fruitfulness" of the marriage.

Did George Eliot know the works of the French lady George? The parties in Adam Bede were some of my favorite scenes of that novel. Here we have George Sand with a book where the great party scene is actually the climax, maybe the point, of the novel.

Everything's great - a George Sand idyll

Everywhere I look, in everything I read, things are going great. Or they go great for a while, but then something bad happens. Or they're going great now, except that things are a little weird, because something bad happened a long time ago. For some reason, I have been reading a lot of idylls.*

Herman Melville, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Longfellow in Evangeline, Eliot in Adam Bede - they all build their stories around some sort of idealized rural setting, always with some sort of threat (even in Arcadia, am I, says Death) hidden somewhere. In Evangeline and Adam Bede, a tragedy disturbs the idyll, while in Stifter and Storm the sorrows lie in the past.

George Sand's The Devil's Pool (1846)** is an especially idyllic idyll. A young farmer, a widower, is going to visit a nearby village to meet an eligible widow. By chance, he is accompanied by a poor, pretty shepherdess; his adorable seven year-old son comes along as well. They all get lost in the woods. The sheperdess is really pretty. And good with children. And she secretly gathers chestnuts while they walk, and has an exta bottle of wine, all of which turns out to be kind of handy when lost in the woods. That widow does not have a prayer.

Sand begins the short novel by invoking a Holbein print, from The Dance of Death. See left. That's Death striking the horses. She describes the image only to reject it:

"So it was that I had before my eyes a picture the reverse of Holbein, although the scene was similar. Instead of a wretched old man, a young and active one; instead of a team of weary and emaciated horses, four yoke of robust and fiery oxen; instead of death, a beautiful child; instead of despair and destruction, energy and the possibility of happiness." (Ch. I)

That young man's story is the one Sand chooses to write. "I might write his story, though that story were as simple, as straightforward, and unadorned as the furrow he was tracing." Curious that she feels she has to justify it like this. I don't understand French Romanticism.

More, the best part of The Devil's Pool, tomorrow.

* Well, not anymore, now that I'm reading Cousin Bette, a vulgar and chaotic anti-idyll.

** La Mare au Diable. I've also seen it translated as The Haunted Pool, and as The Devil's Pond.