Honore de Balsac

Balzac's experience with older women was put to good effect with a series of studies that considered the thirty-year-old woman. His point of departure, for example, in La Maison du chat-quipelote (1842; first published as Gloire et malheur, 1830; translated as The Cat and Battledore, and Other Tales, 1879), was that the lack of preparation, experience, and understanding in girls and young women, which often resulted in mismatches, would encourage disabused older women into more or less disastrous affairs. But the history of one series of texts that eventually resulted in the 1842 novel La Femme de trente ans (translated as A Woman of Thirty, 1901) has more importance for understanding his novelistic practices. The works he wrote in 1831 and 1832 and gathered together as Meme histoire (Same Story) in 1834 have in common a stern thematic warning against adultery. He said that the sketches were tableaux or pictures unified by a thought and that other transitions were unnecessary, since the reader could provide them. There is no indication that he shared Felix Davin's regrets that the tableaux lacked a common character and other standard links of novels. Works such as Histoire des Treize (1839; translated as History of the Thirteen, 1896) make his lack of allegiance to the transitions of traditional narration clear, and are important ones to discuss in a research paper.

When in La Femme de trente ans he joined the sketches of Meme histoire by turning the series of women involved in adultery into one woman, Julie d'Aiglemont, his motivation seems to have been less a desire to make a novel than to emphasize, and thus strengthen, the theme of destructive adultery and filial disobedience by showing how an entire family can be destroyed through the errant behavior of one woman. We may compose a custom essay concentrating on the theme of adultery, which is prevalent in Balzac's works. Not only had he seen its effects from the standpoint of an unloved child, from the trouble occasioned by Bernard-Francois's fathering an illegitimate child in his dotage, and from the misery of his sister Laure in her marriage to a scoundrel, he was able to study it as he pursued his own affair with the still-married Mme de Berny, whom he was betraying with the duchess d'Abrantes. It is difficult to know whether he was insisting on a morality he accepted but was for one reason or other unable to put into practice, or whether he was simply telling his middle-class audience what it wanted to hear. In the midst of all this, Balzac was also writing articles for various reviews and newspapers. He was already the harbinger of the literature of the future, and his cynical articles were welcomed by publishers such as Emile de Girardin, who was representative of the wave of businessmen who came after the Romantic book publishers and who were to find wealth in the growing number of avid readers.