The Executioner (El Verdugo) (1808)
"A heroic son, Juanito...is forced, in order to safeguard the
honour of his family, to decapitate his old father." (Robb, 162)
In this story Balzac conveys "his admiration for the forthright,
passionate temperament of the Spanish and Italian peoples." (Hunt, 36)
Hunt's synopsis is to the point. The story...
...tells of a whole family of Spanish nobles condemned to death in 1809 for
guerrilla warfare; the eldest son is granted his life on condition that
he carries out the sentence upon the rest of them,
and he does so at their earnest persuasion.
Adieu (1812,1819)
Years after the Napoleonic wars have ended a soldier
hunting in the forest with his companion
gets lost and comes across a small town where they encounter
a mad woman playing like a child. The soldier at once
recognizes her as the beautiful Comtesse de Vandieres
he had once known and protected and loved in an unrequited fashion
during the final days of the Napoleonic campaigns in Russia.
This great lady had followed her husband
and the French troops to Moscow only to meet disaster there
with the rest of the French when they were forced to retreat
in the dead of winter.
After the defeat and retreat she had been reduced first to
the state of a camp follower and finally to an almost animal
existence. In order to restore her to her former self
he uses seemingly modern psychological
methods (Freud?) and reconstructs a gigantic mock version of
the battle and defeat that he believes left her insane.
It seems to have a momentary effect, but the end result is tragic.
(Short, Adieu, adieu10.txt)
Facino Cane (1822)
A young writer living a life of poverty in a garret
for the love of knowledge is invited to a wedding
where he encounters an aged musician who sparks his
interest. The musician turns out to be the descendent
of Venetian royalty and relates his tale of woe
and lost treasure.
The young writer suggests they make
a trip to Venice to reclaim it,
but this suggestion comes a little too late.
(Very Short, Facino Cane, fcane10.txt)
The Atheist's Mass (1820,1831)
About the great surgeon Desplein.
Born to a poor family, Desplein was assisted financially
in his education by a poor water carrier named
Bourgeat. Later on when Bourgeat is sick
Desplein nurses him as a son would.
Even though Desplein himself is an atheist,
he establishs a mass for Bourgeat
after his death and assists in it himself.
(Very Short, ,athms10.txt)
A Drama on the Seashore (1824)
The tragic story of how a fisherman carries out the punishment
of death on his dissolute son.
(Very Short, Un Drame au bord de la mer, seshr10.txt)
Jesus Christ in Flanders (After 1426)
The gospel story of Jesus walking on water is rewritten
in the setting of medieval Flanders.
Jesus saves the travellers in a small ferry boat
from drowning after it capsizes.
Extending the temporal and geographical reach of this biblical
story of supernatural intervention is part of Balzac's
visionary program of depicting the universal and eternal.
As the critic Albert Beguin notes:
Elsewhere in the Etudes philosophique,
Balzac has attempted a riskier endeavour,
insofar as it aims to represent,
no longer simply the quest for the absolute,
but an actual part of the vision to which the seeker claimed
to accede.
L'Elixir de longue vie, Jesus-Christ en Flandre, Melmoth reconcile
and above all Seraphita, merit the title of myth in a much more literal sense
than the rest of the Balzacian oeuvre.
Here, it is explicitly a matter of supernatural interventions and,
above all, of stories that are no longer of a man running the earthly risks
and chances of his destiny, ut, instead, the images of the adventure pursued,
from the beginning of time to end, by the whole of humanity.
Each of these narratives, whether it be an invention of Balzac's
or a simple transposition of a traditional legend,
unfolds at the frontiers of temporal reality and the next world
and at the limits of earth and sky.
(Albert Beguin on the Balzac the visionary, in Tilby, 119)
(Very Short, Jesus-Christ en Flandre,flndr10.txt)
La Grande Breteche (1830)
An escaped Spanish nobleman hides in the closet of his lover
when her husband returns home unexpectedly. The husband believes
his wife, sure he does, but then it shouldn't matter if he bricks
up the closet, right? As for the guy in the closet, chivalry is
not dead...yet. (A Cask of Amontillado-like tale.)
(Very Short, La Grande Breteche, brtch10.txt)
The Recruit (1783)
Set during the French revolution in a small provincial town.
About the anxiety and fear that a young aristocratic widow feals
for her son's safety and the paranoia and suspicion that surrounded
the actions of the nobility during the French revolution.
One of Balzac's tales of the para-normal and telepathy with a
flavor similar to the classic TV show "The Twilight Zone."
Hunt (36) calls it "a study of telepathic sympathy between mother and son."
(Very Short, Le Requisitionnaire, recrt10.txt)
An Episode under the Terror (1793)
With the French revolution in full swing
a stranger follows an old lady as she walks
through the deserted streets of Paris at night.
The stranger follows her to the hiding place of
some priests and nuns where he asks them to perform a
mass in memory of the French king who has just
been put to death. Later, they get quite a shock when
they realize the ironic identity of this stranger.
This short story was originally the introduction to
some pseudo-memoirs that Balzac collaborated on,
the Memoirs of Henri Sanson, executioner of the French Revolution and
executioner of King Louis XVI.
The basic theme is Sanson's remorse for having executed the king.
Both Sanson and his son were sort of celebrities during Balzac's time.
In these memoirs Balzac joined a larger movement for the abolition of
capital punishment during his time, by arguing for the removal
of the death penalty. (Hunt, 35-36)
(Very Short, Un Episode sous la Terreur, aeutt10.txt)
The Red Inn (1799)
One evening at her father's house a young woman
asks a German visitor for one of those "dreadful" German stories.
The story he tells reveals a murder that occurred many
years ago that was never solved.
The telling of the tale eventually leads to the death of
the murderer. Or as Hunt describes the story, it...
"...superimposes, on the story of an officer facing the firing-squad
for a murder that he committed in imagination but not in fact,
the discussion of a moral problem.
Except for spasms of neuralgic torture brought on by remorse of conscience,
the real criminal has escaped scot-free and become a millionaire;
should the man who loves his daughter, but who knows the facts,
marry the girl and so acquire a fortune which is tainted with blood?"
(Hunt, 36-7)
(Short, L'Auberge rouge, rdinn10.txt)
A Passion in the Desert (1799)
A man stranded in the desert falls in love in with a beautiful
panther who refrains from eating him.
Not a 'monstrous s * x u * l abberation' but rather a
humorous "comparison between the felinity of women
and the femininity of panthers."
Worth reading with Rilke's poem on the ambience projected by caged Panther.
Some critics claimed that this story was the one
that made Balzac's initial reputation. (Hunt, 36)
(Very Short, Une Passion dans le Desert, apitd10.txt)
The Hated Son
About "the birth, life and premature death of a hypersensitive child
in the early seventeenth century." This short story "gives a foretaste
of Balzac the metaphysician," the author of "Louis Lambert" and "Seraphita".
(Hunt, 37)
(L'Enfant maudit,htdsn10.txt )