In “Another Study of Womankind” there are multiple tellers and listeners, members of a privileged Parisian group that for Balzac retains the conversational art of prerevolutionary aristocratic society. In contrast, “The Red Inn” gives a Gothic twist to the embedded tale. Its recital of gore, guilt, and responsibility is chilling enough, but the main drama may come in its effect on one of its listeners. The tale is proto-Dostoyevsky, adumbrating elements of Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky was an admiring disciple of Balzac, and we often feel the French novelist giving a first sketch of those damned questions at the center of the Russian’s work.

Maybe it’s because these short stories often speak directly to the very process of creation itself that Balzac appears to enjoy himself and to let himself go here more than anywhere else. Nowhere is this more evident than in the short sketch entitled “Facino Cane,” where the embedded tale concerns an old blind musician—he lives in the Paris hospice for the blind—who claims to be a Venetian nobleman with secret knowledge of how to break into the hidden treasury of the doges, which is piled high with gold and diamonds. The reward for listening to his story—for believing in it—could be an immense fortune. The impoverished young writer to whom this story is confided, and who tells it to us, is dazzled by the possible payoff from what he’s heard. Living in a working-class district of Paris, he has so far been content with the riches found in his imaginative life. He uses his imagination to enter into the lives of those he meets or, simply, those he follows in his urban rambles. He makes the claim that “observation had already become an intuitive habit; it could penetrate into the soul without neglecting the body, or rather, so thoroughly did it grasp the external details that it moved immediately beyond: It allowed me to live a person’s life, let me put myself in his place, the way a dervish in The Thousand and One Nights would take over a person’s body and soul by pronouncing certain words over him.” Here the grim realities of the Parisian poor—and the narrator himself is living on only a few sous a day—are displaced or transformed by a movement of the imagination into another person, allowing the creative thinker to live vicariously. That’s not quite right: The imaginative leap here goes beyond what we normally think of as vicarious existence to a kind of identity theft. You can be yourself and another through your capacity to enter into others’ stories. “Listening to these people, I could join in their lives: I would feel their rags on my back, I would be walking in their tattered shoes; their longings, their needs would all move through my soul, or my soul through theirs.” The narrator wonders at the sources of his gift, fears it may carry a certain curse: “To what do I owe this gift? Is it some second sight? One of those talents whose overuse could lead to madness? I have never looked into the sources of this capacity—I have it and I use it, that’s all.”

This could of course be Balzac talking about his own extraordinary gift for getting under the skin of others, espousing their vision of the world, creating a contemporary Thousand and One Nights wrought from the apparently ungrateful material of contemporary Paris, which turns out to be as full of stories as any sultan could wish. Balzac was in fact haunted by the belief that he might be creating too much—overreaching, usurping a power that should only be wielded by God the Father. The fear of madness—which afflicts Facino Cane as it threatens the narrator who discovers him and listens to his tale—lurks throughout The Human Comedy. It may lie in wait for those who attempt to know and to create too much. The work is full of mad inventors—such as Balthazar Claës in The Search for the Absolute; or the composer in “Gambara,” whose invented “panharmonicon” produces a cacophony, though he can sing beautifully when drunk; or the painter Frenhofer of “The Unknown Masterpiece,” who appears to destroy his masterpiece in searching to perfect it. Again and again Balzac makes us privy to a fear that his teeming imagination may lead him over the brink. And in fact the ultimate wise man of The Human Comedy, the philosopher Louis Lambert, ends in madness and aphasia after an attempt at self- castration on the eve of his marriage. There seems to be a haunting fear that self-expression will meet with an insurmountable obstacle: with sterility, madness, the inability to speak.

But madness may be something more than the loss of reason: a state of the ecstatic, of a beyond reason—the place you end up when you have pushed beyond the permitted limits of human thought, creation, experience. It is the most extreme version of the many extreme psychological conditions that interest Balzac. “Adieu,” the story of a woman who goes mad following the crossing of the Berezina River during the retreat of the French army after Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia, offers one of the most extraordinary probes into the psyche in a period that was already intuiting the Freudian revolution to come. Balzac was always interested in the latest scientific (or pseudoscientific) lore. In this tale he seems to have picked up some of the premises of the traitement moral developed by Dr. Philippe Pinel, who took over the directorship of the Salpêtrière hospital for insane and incurable women at the time of the French Revolution. His “psychological treatment” (moral in French can mean psychological as well as moral) often involved inducing patients to relive the moment of trauma that severed them from normal functioning. Pinel understood that a return to the initial scene of suffering that caused the flight from reality into illness could be the starting point of a cure. Despairing of any other form of therapy for his beloved Stéphanie de Vandières, Philippe de Sucy in “Adieu” attempts the reconstruction, more nearly the reproduction of the moment of trauma and loss. It reminds me of the final scene of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where the falsely suspected Hermione after a gap of many years is ransomed from seeming death: “Oh, she’s warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating.” So in that case white magic, not black.