The Memoirs of Two Young Wives

HONORÉ DE BALZAC(1799–1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, was born in Tours and educated at the Collège de Vendôme and the Sorbonne. He began his career as a pseudonymous writer of sensational potboilers before achieving success with a historical novel, The Chouans. Balzac then conceived his great work, La Comédie humaine, an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years, including such masterpieces as Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette. In 1850, he married Eveline Hanska, a rich Polish woman with whom he had long conducted an intimate correspondence. Three months later he died.

JORDAN STUMP is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln; the author, most recently, of The Other Book: Bewilderments of Fiction; and the translator of some twenty works of (mostly) contemporary French prose by authors such as Marie NDiaye, Éric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. His translation of Claude Simon’s The Jardin des Plantes won the French-American Foundation’s annual translation prize in 2001.

MORRIS DICKSTEIN is a distinguished professor emeritus at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author, most recently, of Dancing in the Dark, a cultural history of the Great Depression, and Why Not Say What Happened, a memoir.

OTHER BOOKS BY HONORÉ DE BALZAC PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

The Human Comedy

Translated by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump

Edited and with an introduction by Peter Brooks

The Unknown Masterpiece

Translated by Richard Howard

Introduction by Arthur C. Danto

THE MEMOIRS OF TWO YOUNG WIVES

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Translated from the French by

JORDAN STUMP

Introduction by

MORRIS DICKSTEIN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

Cover image: Raffaello Sanzio, Venus Talking to Ceres and Juno, 1518; De Agostini Picture Library/A. de Gregorio/Bridgeman Images

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Balzac, Honoré de, 1799–1850, author. | Dickstein, Morris, writer of introduction. | Stump, Jordan, 1959– translator.

Title: The memoirs of two young wives / by Honore de Balzac ; introduction by

Morris Dickstein ; translated by Jordan Stump.

Other titles: Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées. English

Description: New York : New York Review Books 2018. | Series: NYRB Classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2017036012 (print) | LCCN 2017036677 (ebook) | ISBN

9781681371269 (epub) | ISBN 9781681371252 (paperback)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Family Life.

Classification: LCC PQ2165.D4 (ebook) | LCC PQ2165.D4 E5 2018 (print) |

DDC 843/.7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036012

ISBN 978-1-68137-126-9

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

THE MEMOIRS OF TWO YOUNG WIVES

Part One

Part Two

Notes

INTRODUCTION

OUT OF the more than ninety novels that make up the so-called Human Comedy of Honoré de Balzac, only a handful are still widely read or assigned in schools, at least in the Anglo-American world: Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, perhaps Cousin Bette, the late novel from which I first learned to read French by dutifully looking up every other word. Yet Balzac was arguably the creator of the modern social novel, “the first and foremost member of his craft” and “the master of us all,” according to Henry James, who wrote about him again and again. His influence was pivotal for writers as varied as James, Flaubert, Zola, Dostoyevsky, and Dreiser, all of whom imitated yet rebelled against him. To his successors he was a rough-hewn genius with an immense appetite for life. “What a man he would have been had he known how to write,” said Flaubert. “But that was the only thing he lacked. After all, an artist would never have accomplished so much nor had such breadth.” They were awed by the scope and sheer abundance of his work, as well as his mastery of scenic detail. So were many social historians and radical writers, beginning with Marx and Engels. Marx lauded his “profound grasp of real conditions,” despite his self-proclaimed Catholic and monarchist views, while Engels felt he had written almost a complete history of French society from 1816 to 1848, novels from which Engels said he’d learned more than from any economist. For twentieth-century critics like Georg Lukács and Erich Auerbach, his work, with its intricate linkage between characters and their milieu, formed the very template of literary realism.

Balzac did not at first set out to write a portrait of his age. Always fluent and prolific, in the 1820s he churned out pulp and Gothic novels under pseudonyms before trying his hand as a printer and businessman. But inspired in part by the historical novels of Walter Scott, he became what he called the “secretary” of French society, the observer who cataloged its complex formations. In his 1842 preface to La Comédie humaine, the ambitious framework he now conceived for his work, he said he wanted to write “the history which so many historians have neglected, that of Moeurs [manners, morals].” On the model of a zoologist classifying animal life, he had become, as he saw it, a “painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the drama of private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloger of professions, a registrar of good and evil.” On this huge, multi-paneled canvas, which ultimately would include more than two thousand characters, many of them reappearing in book after book, he had hoped to “detect the hidden sense of this vast assembly of figures, passions, and incidents.”

While complete sets of Balzac’s work in English translation were once common, few contemporary readers have sought out many of his lesser-known books. Graham Robb concludes his prodigious 1994 biography of Balzac with the terse suggestion that “Unknown masterpieces are waiting to be rediscovered.” The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, first published in 1842, is not exactly a masterpiece, but it’s a singular work, one of Balzac’s Scenes of Private Life, full of arresting detail yet cutting against the grain of his received image as a social realist. James himself wrote a long preface to a 1902 translation, but the novel soon dropped without a trace from the English-speaking world. It’s a gem of a book, occasionally florid and schematic yet engrossing, and this new translation by Jordan Stump makes for precisely the kind of rediscovery that Robb invited.

It’s not hard to see why the book has attracted little notice even in its own time. A novel like Père Goriot is a symphonic work with settings ranging from a faded pension to the great houses of Paris, with a broad spectrum of characters from naive to diabolical, a stark family drama with echoes of King Lear, and at its heart a coming-of-age story that exposes the whole fabric of a vicious, amoral society.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

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