About Vidocq, there was never the least suggestion of homosexuality. His recorded last words were that he had too much loved women, and he more obviously resembled the noisily jovial Monsieur Vautrin of Le Père Goriot than the scarred and ravaged colossus of Splendeurs et misères. He hadn’t the education to pass himself off in Paris as a priest. Among the incidents in his life which are paralleled in the supposed life of Vautrin (but not at all that of Jean Valjean) is that he was first convicted of forgery (Jean Valjean, a simple peasant, archetypally stole a loaf of bread). And then, at the end, we return to the basic parallel. Jacques Collin, like the real-life François-Eugène, is appointed head of a crime squad, though even here the dates are very different indeed.

By 1830, Vidocq had retired (he was to stage a brief comeback, a benevolent industrial enterprise, paralleled by that of Jean Valjean, having failed). He had first entered police service in 1812, under Napoleon, and was given his own section in 1817, under Louis XVIII. In this novel, Vautrin succeeds Bibi-Lupin, himself an ex-convict, who himself bears some resemblance to the real-life Vidocq, at least in his physical appearance, while a man with a comical name of the same type, Coco-Lacour (himself appointed on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, à fripon fripon et demi), was in real life Vidocq’s first, short-lived successor. The point hardly needs labouring. About the figure of Vautrin, the reader who doesn’t know Balzac in a large way may care to be told, however, that, at a supposedly later date, he reappears in his ‘last incarnation’ in La Cousine Bette, a novel written and published earlier than Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. There the reader would receive the impression that his real name was Vautrin, not Jacques Collin.

How the homosexual thing came in, I don’t know. To us, it is certainly there. How much it was there to Balzac is a different matter. He knew about the existence of male prostitutes, that is certain. He knew that prison life tended to foster homosexual practices. I am nevertheless far from certain that he conceived the relations between Lucien and his Mephistopheles to be anything like those we now regard as normal between men whom we describe as consenting adults. Not to put too fine a point upon it, if he did, the sum total of sexual services then required of Lucien would be such that we need hardly feel surprised that, on his free evenings, all he wanted to do was recline on a divan and smoke a hookah. The idea of Jacques Collin as homosexual Mephistopheles to a succession of young Fausts was, I suppose, first suggested by Proust. The famous passage I spoke of earlier, towards the end of Illusions perdues, shows the Spanish priest halting his carriage and gazing at the early home of young Rastignac. This passage was described by Proust’s Baron de Charlus as ‘the Tristesse d’Olympio of pederasty’ (Tristesse d’Olympio being a poem by Victor Hugo meditating amid scenes of lost happiness). It will now retain that flavour for ever. I remain unconvinced that it is what Balzac had in mind. There is, for instance, no suggestion in Le Père Goriot or, retrospectively, in the novel before us that the ambitious Rastignac had ever given M. Vautrin or anyone else that kind of pleasure. What Rastignac mainly represented to Balzac was persistent ambition, and at that moment Mephistopheles was plotting a great future for another Faust.

The Translation

POOR workmen blame their tools, and the difficulties of its translator do not ordinarily concern the reader of a novel from a foreign language. The thing should simply read well in its new language and the translator’s fidelity to his original be taken for granted. In the present case, there were, however, one or two problems which I hope were insoluble, since I am conscious of not having solved them. Nor can they be effectively concealed. They appear as snags on the surface. The reader is bound to notice them.

Of such unsolved problems the least deeply significant but most recurrently tedious was the dialogue given to Baron Nucingen, the banker, commonly understood to be Alsatian but on occasion referred to, in respect of his way of speech, as a Polish Jew.