Some of its mystery can never quite be known. To open up what society and the novel of manners repress, to stage a kind of explosive upthrust of that which is ordinarily kept down, under control, is Balzac’s delight and his passion. He asks to be read in a spirit of adventure and daring.

—PETER BROOKS

THE HUMAN COMEDY

FACINO CANE

To Louise, in witness of fond gratitude

AT THE time, I was living on a little street you probably do not know, rue de Lesdiguières: It starts at rue Saint-Antoine across from a fountain near place de la Bastille, and ends at rue de la Cérisaie. A passion for knowledge had flung me into a garret room where I worked nights, and I would spend the day in a nearby library established by Monsieur, the king’s brother. I lived frugally; I had accepted all the conditions of monastic life so necessary to serious workers. In fine weather I would at most take a brief stroll on boulevard Bourdon. There was only one activity that could draw me away from my studious routine, although this was virtually part of the same passion: I would walk about observing the customs of the neighborhood, its inhabitants and their character. As poorly dressed as the workmen myself, careless about decorum, I never put them on their guard—I could mingle in their groups, watch them closing deals and arguing as they ended the day. In my own work, 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.

Occasionally, on some nights between eleven and midnight, I would come across a workman and his wife on their way home from the Ambigu-Comique music hall, and I would spend some time following them from boulevard du Pont-aux-Choux to boulevard Beaumarchais. These good folk would be chatting about the show they had just seen; eventually they would get around to talking about their work; the woman tugged her child by the hand, ignoring his whining or questions; the parents calculated the money they expected to collect the next day, the twenty different ways they’d spend it. Then they would move on to the household details: laments over the high price of potatoes or the long winter and the rising cost of peat; vehement remarks on the baker’s bill; then on to more venomous spats with each displaying his feelings in picturesque terms. 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. It was a waking man’s dream. I would rage with them against the tyranny of the shop foremen or the bad clients who made them come back time and again without giving them their pay.

Dropping my own habits, becoming another person through a kind of intoxication of my imaginative faculties, and playing the game at will—that was my delight. 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. I will say, though, that from that time on, I have gone on teasing apart the elements of the heterogeneous mass we call “the people,” analyzing and evaluating its good or bad features.

Already back then I understood how useful this neighborhood could be, this seedbed of revolution, seething with heroes, inventors, skilled workmen, with rascals and scoundrels, with virtues and vices, all exacerbated by poverty, strangled by need, drowned in wine, ravaged by strong liquor. You cannot imagine how many ruined hopes, how many unknown dramas in that city of sorrow! How many horrible and beautiful things! Imagination could never touch the reality hidden there, a reality no one could ever uncover—one would have to burrow too deep to find these amazing scenes, tragic and comic, masterpieces born of chance. I don’t know how I’ve gone so long without telling this story: It is one of those strange tales left behind in the sack that memory randomly draws from, like lottery numbers. I have plenty more of them, all as singular as this one, just as thoroughly buried, though they will have their moment, believe me.

One day my housekeeper, a workman’s wife, asked for the honor of my presence at the wedding of one of her sisters. To give you an idea of what such a wedding would be like, I will tell you that I paid forty sous a month to this poor creature, who came in every morning to make my bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room, and prepare my lunch; the rest of the day she spent turning the lever of some machine, and for that hard labor she earned another ten sous a day. Her husband, a cabinetmaker, earned four francs a day. But as the household also included three children, they could barely manage to put an honest loaf of bread on the table. I’ve never come across more earnest decency than I saw in this man and woman. When I moved away from the neighborhood, for the next five years this Mother Vaillant would visit me with birthday greetings, bearing a bouquet and oranges—this woman who never had ten sous to spare. Poverty had brought us close. I was never able to pay her more than ten francs, often borrowed for the occasion. This may explain why I promised to attend the wedding; I meant to nestle into the happiness of these poor folks.

Both the ceremony and the festivities took place at the warehouse of a wine merchant on rue Charenton, one floor up in a large hall lit by tin reflector lamps; the walls were hung with filthy paper at table level and lined with wooden benches. Inside the room some eighty people gathered in their Sunday best, with flowers and ribbons all around, everyone soaring with the nightlife spirit of the dance halls at La Courtille; their faces flaming, they danced as if the world was about to end. The bride and groom hugged and kissed to the general satisfaction of the guests, cheered on by lewd teasing of “Hey hey, thataway! Haha!”—actually, less indecent than the bashful glances of well-bred young ladies. The whole crowd gave off an animal good humor that was somehow contagious.

But neither the faces of this bunch, nor the wedding feast, nor anything of that world matters to my story.