As they privately chronicle their hopes and experiences to each other, they highlight the differences between the city and the country, Paris and the provinces, society and domesticity. Once Renée settles quickly on marriage while Louise falls in love with her exiled tutor, their letters turn into a clash between imagination and reason, headlong passion and sober calculation. As Renée invests all in creating a family, Louise pursues an ideal vision of romance, an insufficient word for the kind of “boundless” transcendence she seeks in love. Her marriage is a conflagration, burningly sexual but also beyond the sexual. She longs for a completely transfiguring intimacy of souls, something that would suffer no aging or abatement, no descent into the routine or the familiar, no intrusion from workaday social relations or child-rearing. Hers is a version of the cult of romantic love, the Tristan myth explored by Denis de Rougemont in Love in the Western World, a consummation beyond the body that can only be ratified by death, seen as a final perfection, beyond loss or change.

Renée, on the other hand, has “embraced Devotion as a shipwrecked sailor desperately clings to the mast.” To her Louise has been “depraving the institution of marriage,” living out the “voluptuous excesses that the law unwittingly allows,” trying “to be both the wife and the mistress.” She warns her friend that “an immense, boundless happiness will destroy you in the end.” For Renée, such “devouring” passion—or passion in general—must inevitably decline; permanence in marriage rests instead on a “deep, serene mutual familiarity.” She briskly chooses duty over desire, the bond of friendship, companionship over heedless love, yet her call to “devotion” exposes an underlying desperation. One fascinating feature of the book is the reversals that occur as these two women—by now less women than counters in a philosophical debate—live each other’s lives vicariously: Louise, otherwise content, cries out in the end for never having had children while Renée unexpectedly laments having missed out on love, being reduced to routine. This is only one of the many doubling effects that gives the novel a classical sense of symmetry.

Baudelaire, in some startlingly incisive remarks about Balzac’s work not long after his death, pointed to another feature of this duality. “It often surprises me that Balzac’s greatest claim to fame is to pass as an observer; it always seemed to me that his principal merit lay in being a visionary, a passionate visionary. All of his characters are endowed with that life force by which he himself was animated. All of his tales are as vibrantly colorful as dreams.” This is why his characters, like those of Dickens, seem so exaggerated, not simply specimens of social types but, as Baudelaire says, the palpable result of Balzac’s own visionary intensity. All of them are “more fiercely alive, more active and cunning in their struggles, more patient in their misfortunes, more gluttonous in their pleasures, more angelic in their devotions, than any real-world comedy might reveal to us. . . . Every soul is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with willpower. Indeed, this is Balzac himself.” James, in his introduction, made a similar point about Balzac the historian or reporter and Balzac the “originator,” with “his unequalled power of putting people on their feet, planting them before us in their habit as they lived,” but doing so “with the inner vision all the while wide-awake.” By the “secret of an insistence,” says James in his inimitable late style, Balzac “warms his facts into life.” Both Baudelaire and James see Balzac’s apparent flaws, his heated exaggerations, as secret strengths.

It is not hard to take the argument at the heart of The Memoirs of Two Young Wives as a representation of these two sides of Balzac’s creative mind, as dramatized in the friction between Louise the visionary, drawn to peak experience, uncompromising and intense in her demands upon life, and Renée the realist, strictly practical, with her iron sense of limits. Together, these two qualities were the source of what commentators have sharply noted: Balzac’s visceral presence in his work. As one of his best biographers, V. S. Pritchett, put it, “Balzac is always felt as a sanguine presence in his writing, breathless with knowledge, fantasy, and things seen.” Describing his “ubiquity” as a novelist, he adds, “There is a spry, pungent, and pervasive sense that in any scene he was there, and in the flesh.” In the range of his empathy, in the busily peopled world he creates, with characters recurring like real people from book to book, Balzac can be compared not only to Dickens but to Shakespeare. Even as spare a novel as The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, with its weighty themes but limited cast, helps explain just how he did it, for its inner drama could well be a reflection of his own divided self.

—MORRIS DICKSTEIN

THE MEMOIRS OF TWO YOUNG WIVES

To George Sand

Dear George, this dedication will add no luster to your name, which will rather cast its magical glow over my book, but there is neither calculation nor modesty behind it. I seek only to attest to the real friendship that we have kept up through all our travels and separations, in spite of our work and the rigors of our world. That sentiment will doubtless never change. The parade of comradely names that will accompany my works adds a pleasure to the pains caused me by their number, for they are not without their travails, to speak only of the aspersions my threatening fecundity has earned me—as if the world posing before me were not more prolific still! Will it not be a fine thing, George, if one day the archaeologist of long-lost literatures rediscovers in that parade only illustrious names, noble hearts, pure and sacred friendships, and the greatest glories of this century? May I not take more pride in that incontestable happiness than in any ever-disputable success? For those who know you well, is it not a happiness to be able to call oneself, as I do here,

Your friend,

de Balzac

Paris, June 1840

PART ONE

1

FROM MADEMOISELLE LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO MADEMOISELLE RENÉE DE MAUCOMBE

Paris, September [1]

My dear doe, I too am now out in the world! And unless you have written me in Blois, I am also the first to arrive at our charming rendezvous by correspondence. Unstick your beautiful black eyes from my first sentence, and save your exclamations for a later letter, the one in which I tell you of my first love. People always talk about the first love; is there a second, then? “Hush now!” you must surely be saying, “and tell me: How did you ever escape from that convent, where you were meant to take your vows?” My dear, whatever may go on among the Carmelites, the miracle of my deliverance is the most natural thing in the world. The protests of a horrified conscience simply overruled the dictates of a long-settled design. My aunt had no desire to see me die of consumption; she won out over my mother, who was still prescribing the novitiate as the only cure for my frailty. That happy ending was hastened by the bleak melancholy I fell into after you left. And so now I am in Paris, my angel, and it is to you that I owe the joy of being here.

My Renée, had you seen me the day I found myself without you, you would have been proud to inspire such deep emotion in so young a heart. So much did we dream as one, so often did we spread our wings together, so long did we live a shared life that I believe our souls were knit one to the other, like those two Hungarian girls[2] whose death was recounted to us by Monsieur Beauvisage, who certainly did not live up to his name—was there ever a man better suited to be a convent doctor! And did you perhaps suffer right along with your darling? Listless and despondent, I could only think of the many bonds that united us, counting them off one by one; I feared they’d been broken forever by the distance between us, and I conceived a loathing for existence, like a heartbroken lovebird.