Balzac seems to make reference to this idea early on in Père Goriot when presenting the dramatis personae of the Maison Vauquer. Of Victorine Taillefer he writes: “A book might have been made of her story” (p. 21). The statement could apply to any one of the characters in the narrative, and indeed does apply to several. “A book might have been made of her story”: This is as true of Victorine Taillefer as it is of Madame de Beauséant (that book being La Femme abandonnée [The Abandoned Woman, 1833] ) , as it is of the Duchesse de Langeais (see La Duchesse de Langeais, 1834), or the Baron de Nucingen (The Firm of Nucingen, 1838) , or the money-lender (Gobseck, 1830), or Vautrin (The Last Incarnation of Vautrin), and so on and so on. Had Balzac lived long enough (he died at fifty) and been inclined, he could and would have made a book of the stories of the others too (of Madame Vauquer, for example, of the mysterious Mademoiselle Michonneau, etc.). Balzac’s books thus give the impression of being infinitely extensible in all directions, multiplexes opening up onto new vistas on all sides.

Balzac was a storyteller, and he saw the world as a vast network of interconnected stories: No one is without a story. No one, and perhaps no thing, for things in Balzac are as telling as bodies and faces. A chair—its period, the degree of its polish, its upholstery, its hue, where it was bought, to whom it belongs, to whom it has belonged, where it is placed in a room, its relation to other furnishings in the room—can tell us much about a person, for in Balzac there is a continuity between people and the things that surround them.2 Madame Vauquer’s torn petticoat, to quote a classic example, “discovers the cook [and] foreshadows the lodgers” (pp. 15-16) . It is as though things, like people, are subject to the laws of phrenology and physiology that so fascinated Balzac; as though, reading Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Kaspar Lavater, Balzac intuited the transhuman potential of the theory whereby the external (cranium, facial traits) reveals the internal (character).

Such a creative understanding and application of science (or here of pseudoscience) would be in keeping with Balzac’s overall approach to various branches of human knowledge. His two intellectual mentors—Georges Cuvier, the zoologist whose lectures Bianchon attends (as did Balzac), and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the naturalist to whom Balzac dedicated Père Goriot (as well as the collected Comédie humaine)—shared the conviction that an organism cannot be studied independently of its milieu. A basic scientific premise, but one whose consequences had not been applied to the literary study of the human species—and a premise that led Balzac to place unprecedented importance on the representation of the material world. In exposing the general conception of the Comédie in the foreword to the whole, Balzac explains why things matter. The idea for La Comédie humaine, he writes there, “came from a comparison between Humanity and Animality.” “There is but one animal.” “The Creator used one and the same pattern for all organized beings. An animal is a principle that takes its external form, or to speak more precisely, the differences in its form, from the milieu in which it happens to develop. The Zoological Species result from these differences”—an idea Balzac transposes to the study of humanity: “Does not society make of mankind, according to the milieu in which his being has unfolded, as many different men as there are varieties in zoology? The differences between a soldier, a worker, an administrator, a lawyer, an idler, a scholar, a man of State, a shopkeeper, a sailor, a poet, a pauper, a priest, are, although more difficult to grasp, as considerable as those that distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the seal, the ewe.”

Balzac thus proposes to do for society what Cuvier, Saint-Hilaire, and especially Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, the great classifier of all knowledge in natural history, had done for animal and plant life. But Balzac’s task is much more complicated than Buffon’s, for several reasons. Buffon, for example, once he had described the lion, dispatches with the lioness in a couple of sentences, since for him the lioness is the female of the lion and nothing more. With the human species things are quite different: Women are as various in their forms as are men. Moreover, all sorts of irregularities of alliance must be accounted for in humans. As Balzac writes in his foreword, “The wife of a merchant is sometimes worthy of being the wife of a prince, and often the wife of a prince is not worth that of an artist.” In either case the wife, being every bit as complex as her man but differently so, demands an equally detailed treatment, thereby doubling the labor of description falling to Balzac. Furthermore, in cataloguing the animals, Buffon had not to deal with the issue of social mobility. Among humans, nothing is more common than shifts in the social hierarchy: “The shopkeeper can certainly become a peer of France, and the noble descend to the lowest social rank,” and the reasons for such ups and downs must be considered. And finally, while the habits and behavior of animals remain fairly constant through the ages, the chronicle Balzac undertakes must acknowledge that “the habits, clothes, words, domiciles of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper are entirely unlike and change at the will of civilizations.”

Hence, the task is not just twice as extensive as that carried out by Buffon, but three times, for to the portrayal of all types of men and women must be added the representation of all types of things: “Thus the work to be done should have a triple form: men, women, and things, that is to say, people and the material representations that they give of their thought: in the end, mankind and life” (foreword to La Comédie humaine) . To place things—the “material representations” that collectively make up the milieu—on the same level as humans was a radical gesture, and Balzac’s preoccupation with the material sharply distinguishes his novels from those of the late Romantic era. Take a novel such as Adolphe (1816), by Benjamin Constant, and you would be hard put to find in it a single, material object. Ninety-nine percent of the nouns are abstract nouns referring to the emotions and sentiments of the protagonist, which the novel dissects in painstaking detail. Balzac introduces his readers to a new kind of novel in which we have full and immediate access to the material conditions of existence as a matter of course. This world is made up of things: shoes, mud, gloves, bread, francs and louis, wallpaper, bedsheets, food.

Balzac had an eye for things, not just because he was born into a society of bourgeois consumers (although he loved to shop) but because the representation of the material world was integral to his narrative plan. Things and characters are corollaries in Balzac’s fiction: One could no more study a man without looking at the objects by which he is surrounded than one could study a plant without considering the soil in which it grows.