The Muse of the Department (1836-43)

The novel in which what a crumpled dress worn by a woman in a carriage implied was, "cited in Parliament as proof that novelists were becoming too immoral for the good of the nation." (Robb, 352)

Dinah Piedefer is the "muse" of the title married to the Baron de La Baudraye who is a member of the new aristocracy to appear after 1815, is twenty-seven years older than her, unable to provide her with any children, won't allow her to live in Paris, and uses her inheritance for himself. They live in the provincial town of Sancerre where she is the head of a local literary circle which provides her with several admirers. The activities of this literary circle and the frustrations of life in the provinces occupy the first half of the novel.

Horace Bianchon, the doctor, and Etiene Lousteau, the journalist, characters who appear in many Balzac novels, are invited to Dinah's home in the provinces as Parisian celebrities. Their participation in the literary circle brings a Parisian sophistication that is a sharp contrast to Sancere's provincialism. Lousteau ends up seducing Dinah with the help of Bianchon.

After Lousteau returns to Paris, Dinah discovers she is pregnant and runs away to Paris to join him, but the arrival of Dinah ruins Lousteau's plan to marry a young woman of the Cardot family with a good dowery. The cartoonist Bixiou helped him in this endeavour.

The second half of the novel covers Dinah's life in Paris as Lousteau's mistress. She adapts to life in Paris and even writes a novel out of material given to her by the writer Raoul Nathan (see "The Prince of Bohemia" for this fact). Although sacrificing everything for Lousteau and bearing him two sons, Lousteau's bad character, his debt, vice, and laziness, and the state of domestic slavery she lives in, eventually makes Dinah realize that she has made a mistake.

Dinah's situation becomes like that of Eleonore in the famous novel of the time "Adolphe" by Benjamin Constant: first she is seduced, then she sacrifices everything for her lover, then the lover grows weary of her, and then finally she becomes an object of pity. "Adolphe" becomes Dinah's favorite book and shortly before breaking up, Lousteau and Dinah compare their situation with the book. The egotistical Lousteau stands the novel Adolphe on its head by asserting that Dinah, his Eleonore, is to blame, because she has ruined his career. He also asserts she does not realize the difference between true love and the mere physical unfaithfulness that he is guilty of.

By chance at the theater one night, she runs into the elderly and ugly de Clagny, former member of her literary circle back in the provinces and her most ardent admirer. Providing a wonderful portrait of faithful friendship, de Clagny helps her get her two children by Lousteau registered in her husband the baron's name and eventually helps her rejoin her husband in a life of respectability in the house that he has bought in Paris. Despite his age and the inability to have children of his own the baron ends up becoming a peer of France and a Commander of the Legion of Honor. Balzac perversely allows Lousteau to come back one more time and have one last fling with Dinah.

(Medium, La Muse du departement, msdpt10.txt)