Repertory of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z. Anatole Cerfberr
smallest detail, and an entire class from a single individual; but that which guided him in his work of reconstruction was always and everywhere the habitual process of philosophers: the quest and investigation of causes.
It is due to this analysis that this dreamer has defined almost all the great principles of the psychological changes incident to our time. He saw clearly, while democracy was establishing itself with us on the ruins of the ancient regime, the novelty of the sentiments which these transfers from class to class were certain to produce. He fathomed every complication of heart and mind in the modern woman by an intuition of the laws which control her development. He divined the transformation in the lives of artists, keeping pace with the change in the national situation; and to this day the picture he has drawn of journalism in Lost Illusions ("A Distinguished Provincial at Paris") remains strictly true. It seems to me that this same power of locating causes, which has brought about such a wealth of ideas in his work, has also brought about the magic of it all. While other novelists describe humanity from the outside, he has shown man to us both from within and without. The characters which crowd forth from his brain are sustained and impelled by the same social waves which sustain and impel us. The generative facts which created them are the same which are always in operation about us. If many young men have taken as a model a Rastignac, for instance, it is because the passions by which this ambitious pauper was consumed are the same which our age of unbridled greed multiplies around disinherited youth. Add to this that Balzac was not content merely to display the fruitful sources of a modern intellect, but that he cast upon them the glare of the most ardent imagination the world has ever known. By a rare combination this philosopher was also a man, like the story-tellers of the Orient, to whom solitude and the over-excitement of night-work had communicated a brilliant and unbroken hallucination. He was able to impart this fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of Arabian Nights country, where all the passions, all the desires of real life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the dreams brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of Balzac's is more real than the actual world, and that they devoted their energies to imitating it?
It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive influences. It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central portions of the nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread the Comedie Humaine. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe for this Repertory. Thanks to them, we shall the more easily traverse the long galleries, painted and frescoed, of this enormous palace—a palace still unfinished, inasmuch as it lacks those Scenes of Military Life whose titles awaken dreams within us: Forced Marches; The Battle of Austerlitz; After Dresden. Incontestably, Tolstoy's War and Peace is an admirable book, but how can we help regretting the loss of the painting of the Grand Army and of our Great Emperor, by Balzac, our Napoleon of letters?
PAUL BOURGET.
REPERTORY OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE
A
ABRAMKO, Polish Jew of gigantic strength, thoroughly devoted to the broker, Elie Magus, whose porter he was, and whose daughter and treasures he guarded with the aid of three fierce dogs, in 1844, in a old house on the Minimes road hard by the Palais Royale, Paris. Abramko had allowed himself to be compromised in the Polish insurrection and Magus was interested in saving him. [Cousin Pons.]
ADELE, sturdy, good-hearted Briarde servant of Denis Rogron and his sister, Sylvie, from 1824 to 1827 at Provins. Contrary to her employers, she displayed much sympathy and pity for their youthful cousin, Pierrette Lorrain. [Pierrette.]
ADELE, chambermaid of Madame du Val-Noble at the time when the latter was maintained so magnificently by the stockbroker, Jacques Falleix, who failed in 1929. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.]
ADOLPHE, slight, blonde young man employed at the shop of the shawl merchant, Fritot, in the Bourse quarter, Paris, at the time of the reign of Louis Philippe. [Gaudissart II.]
ADOLPHUS, head of the banking firm of Adolphus & Company of Manheim, and father of the Baroness Wilhelmine d'Aldrigger. [The Firm of Nucingen.]
AGATHE (Sister), nee Langeais, nun of the convent of Chelles, and, with her sister Martha and the Abbe de Marolles, a refugee under the Terror in a poor house of the Faubourg Saint-Martin, Paris. [An Episode Under the Terror.]
AIGLEMONT (General, Marquis Victor d'), heir of the Marquis d'Aiglemont and nephew of the dowager Comtesse de Listomere-Landon; born in 1783. After having been the lover of the Marechale de Carigliano, he married, in the latter part of 1813 (at which time he was one of the youngest and most dashing colonels of the French cavalry), Mlle. Julie de Chatillonest, his cousin, with whom he resided successively at Touraine, Paris and Versailles.* He took part in the great struggle of the Empire; but the Restoration freed him from his oath to Napoleon, restored his titles, entrusted to him a station in the Body Guard, which gave him the rank of general, and later made him a peer of France. Gradually he forsook his wife, whom he deceived on account of Madame de Serizy. In 1817 the Marquis d'Aiglemont became the father of a daughter (See Helene d'Aiglemont) who was his image physically and morally; his last three children came into the world during a liaison between the Marquise d'Aiglemont and the brilliant diplomat, Charles de Vandenesse. In 1827 the general, as well as his protege and cousin, Godefroid de Beaudenord, was hurt by the fraudulent failure of the Baron de Nucingen. Moreover, he sank a million in the Wortschin mines where he had been speculating with hypothecated securities of his wife's. This completed his ruin. He went to America, whence he returned, six years later, with a new fortune. The Marquis d'Aiglemont died, overcome by his exertions, in 1833.** [At the Sign of the Cat and Racket. The Firm of Nucingen. A Woman of Thirty.]
* It appears that the residence of the Marquis d'Aiglemont at
Versailles was located at number 57, on the present Avenue de
Paris; until recently it was occupied by one of the authors of
this work.
** Given erroneously in the original as 1835.
AIGLEMONT (Generale, Marquise Julie d'), wife of the preceding; born in 1792. Her father, M. de Chatillonest, advised her against, but gave her in marriage to her cousin, the attractive Colonel Victor d'Aiglemont, in 1813. Quickly disillusioned and attacked from another source by an "inflammation very often fatal, and which is spoken of by women only in confidence," she sank into a profound melancholy. The death of the Comtesse de Listomere-Landon, her aunt by marriage, deprived her of valuable protection and advice. Shortly thereafter she became a mother and found, in the realization of her new duties, strength to resist the mutual attachment between herself and the young and romantic Englishman, Lord Arthur Ormond Grenville, a student of medicine who had nursed her and healed her bodily ailments, and who died rather than compromise her. Heart-broken, the marquise withdrew to the solitude of an old chateau situated between Moret and Montereau in the midst of a neglected waste. She remained a recluse for almost a year, given over utterly to her grief, refusing the consolations of the Church offered her by the old cure of the village of Saint-Lange. Then she re-entered society at Paris. There, at the age of about thirty, she yielded to the genuine passion of the Marquis de Vandenesse. A child, christened Charles, was born of this union, but he perished at an early age under very tragic circumstances. Two other children, Moina and Abel, were also the result of this love union. They were favored by their mother above the two eldest children, Helene and Gustave, the only ones really belonging to the Marquis d'Aiglemont. Madame d'Aiglemont, when nearly