Balzac’s result is less certainly on the lawful side. The attempt to cure insanity may itself be a kind of overreaching, something for which a high price will be exacted.

Madness and the erotic are also closely allied in Balzac. In “A Passion in the Desert,” surely one of the strangest tales ever published, a French soldier taking part in Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign gets lost in the Maghreb desert, finds a small oasis with palm trees and a cave, and takes shelter—only to discover that it is inhabited by a panther. The soldier’s developing relations with the panther, which is constantly compared to an alluring and dangerous woman, result in one of Balzac’s most telling explorations of erotic passion. The panther allows him to talk about female sexuality (as understood by a male: those teeth!) in a way that wasn’t possible when talking about “respectable” women of society. As the French soldier caresses the beast he calls “Mignonne” with his dagger, he finds in himself emotions he has never known before. The extreme situation seems to cut through social repression. In the extended analogy of panther to woman, Balzac is remarkably explicit in describing a kind of sexual foreplay leading to what the soldier later describes as a “misunderstanding.” There are other kinds of extreme situations of love and sexuality: Balzac stages moments of near-incest, same-sex relations among both women and men, fetishism, borderline S/M, as well as intoxicating self-immolations in chastity. Proust, an avid reader of Balzac, was especially alert to such moments. He noted that “under the apparent and outward action of the drama circulate the mysterious laws of flesh and passion”: among other things, an acknowledgment of Balzac as precursor in the exploration of sexualities that did not quite dare speak their name.

Again in “A Passion in the Desert” we are given a framed tale of some complexity: The story opens at Monsieur Martin’s menagerie (an actual Parisian attraction of Balzac’s time). The narrator’s woman companion expresses surprise that Martin’s beasts have been so thoroughly tamed that he can enter their cage with impunity. To which the narrator responds that he, too, was surprised on his first visit to the menagerie, but that he encountered there a one-legged soldier who claimed it could be easily explained. It is from this soldier that the narrator heard the tale of the panther met in the desert, which he now writes down for his woman friend—but withholding the end, which he will have to deliver as a spoken coda to the tale. The links between the tale told and the situation of its telling are by no means obvious here. What, if anything, does the soldier’s amputated leg have to do with his adventure with the panther? Are her teeth responsible? And if we learn from contemporary accounts that Monsieur Martin was reputed to master his wild beasts by satisfying them sexually before a performance, what further connections do we want to tease out among the various forms of passion? Freud began his momentous Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality with a discussion of “the perversions,” in order to go on to show that “normal” sexuality was simply what was most widely accepted on a spectrum of “psychosexuality,” that is to say, sex in the mind.

There are passions other than the erotic at play in these tales: those aroused by politics and money, for instance. In “Z. Marcas,” the ups and downs of the title character’s political career during a turbulent period in French history are told episodically, partially, obliquely by the two students who share a landing with him in a cheap lodging house. It’s as if Balzac were writing a political biography but refusing to do it straight, understanding that the story of a disillusioned political veteran can be more effectively told through its effects on two ambitious young men with their futures before them. If Marxist critics, starting with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, have been among the most appreciative of Balzac’s readers, it’s because Balzac —who loudly declared himself a monarchist and Catholic—had no use for the compromise regimes of his lifetime, and denounced their incoherence and corruption. Born in 1799, in the year following Napoleon’s coup d’état, Balzac lived as a child through the epic of the Napoleonic Wars and the Empire, then the collapse of Waterloo and the subsequent Restoration monarchy, which in turn collapsed in the Revolution of 1830, which brought the rule of the “Citizen King,” Louis Philippe d’Orléans (from the younger branch of the royal family), along with the exile of the last of the Bourbon monarchs. The Restoration ought to have pleased Balzac—but it was in his judgment not a true, vigorous reinstatement of monarchy but a simulacrum, where the aged rulers of France were out of touch with the real dynamics of the time, and the restored aristocracy was far more concerned with its privileges and petty class distinctions than with the responsibilities of power and leadership. It ended, as it deserved, in revolution, in 1830, and the “bourgeois monarchy” of Louis Philippe, no longer king of France but “King of the French.” Marcas suffers through these regimes, with the reward of ingratitude.

Balzac’s quarrel with the Restoration returns in “The Duchesse de Langeais,” the four-part novella in which the opening of the second chapter is devoted to a disquisition about the place of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in French politics and history. Named for the quarter of Paris where the aristocracy began settling in large town houses in the late seventeenth century—many of them still stand in the seventh arrondissement of Paris—the “noble Faubourg” was a place, a class, and a concept. But according to Balzac, it never took on the role that it should have for the Restoration to be a success. The nobility, concerned with its own privileges and prerogatives, didn’t recruit aspiring young men of talent—like Balzac—who were only too eager to join its ranks. It failed to act on the model of the Tory Party in England, which reached into the middle class to renew its forces and anchor itself more firmly in the affections of the citizenry. The French Restoration was a gerontocracy—the two kings of the era, Louis XVIII and Charles X, were both brothers of Louis XVI, guillotined in 1793, and old men by the time they ascended the throne—out of touch with the youth of the country. It was, in Balzac’s judgment, a cold, mean, selfish time. The result was a more and more vigorous and vocal political opposition. Journalists were in the vanguard during the three “glorious days” of the Revolution of 1830: New rules tightening censorship of newspapers helped to spark the insurrection.

The Revolution was no more to Balzac’s liking than the Restoration.