Aug 20
The Girl with the Golden eyes
Oscar wilde in his essay, The Decay of lying, wrote: “Balzac does not copy life, he creates it.” Wilde’s sentiment perhaps best describes what the french author managed to accomplish with his audacious cycle of interconnected novels, titled The human comedy. The title, that inexorably calls to mind Dante and his The Divine Comedy. Balzac’s penchant for making his works evocative of the divine comedy does not end there. In The Girl with the Golden eyes, a novella published in 1835, the third part of History of thirteen, while describing the speciously effulgent Paris and its inhabitants with his usual sagacity and assidousness and after declaring, that “Everything contributes to the upward movement of money”, Balzac directly references Dante: “Which brings us to the third circle of this Hell, Which one day will perhaps find its Dante”. * Afterwards he goes on comparing disctricts of Paris to the circles of hell from Inferno.
All of Balzac’s least obscure novels broach the ignobility and the hypocrisy of the Bourgeoisie. To have been so vociferously critical of the ruling class and to still have gotten your work, which was the way of scoffing at the Bourgeoisie, published in your lifetime, is an achievment of its own, not mentioning the merits of the published works themselves. The Girl with the golden eyes is no exception, albeit a lot more peculiar than the rest of the humane comedy, it juts out as being the most modern from the catalog. Nowhere else does Balzac seem more privy to the filthy secrets of the elite, nowhere else does he employ such shrewd judgement and nowhere else does the plot and the character blend into each other so seemlesly, as in The Girl with the Golden eyes. Depending on the translation, The Girl with the Golden eyes is no more than scanty 60 pages, but it is Balzac at his best game. Compared to it, The lost illusions seems fumbling, Father goriot, sententious and too lugubrious, A women of thirty, a topsy-turvydom and Ceasar birottoeau, a novel with too simple a premise.
The premise of The Girl with the Golden eyes is, like Ceasear birottoeau, uncomplicated. Saying the premise is simple does not equal saying, that the story itself is simple. The plot of the novella is the story of the young vulpine dandy Henri de Marsay and the mysterious foreign girl, Paquita Valdes, sojourning in Paris. The infatuation, that Henri starts to harbor towards the girl immediatly upon meeting her, soon hardens into an obssesion to own her. It quickly becomes clear, that the young dandy is deeply troubled. A state of mind, in which Henri’s father had a hand. Among other merits, that redound to the magnificence of The Girl with the Golden eyes, is the incredulous psychological depth of the characters. In his introduction to the Oxford’s world classics edition of The Girl with the golden eyes and other stories, Professor Patrick Coleman describes Henri as having a Narcissistic personality disorder, a diagnose which is perhaps a little misleading. Saying Henri is simply a narcissist diminishes the mysterious air that surrounds the character and also curtails our interpratation and the appreciation of the text. In lieu of diagnosing the characters , maybe it is better to ascribe their bacchaic nature to what the ancient greeks called ate, for it is the inscurtability of the minds of the main characters, their mutual obsession and all that ensues, that makes The Girl with the Golden eyes a tour de force of Balzac. Here, Balzac does not rummage in the minds of his characters ,In an endeavor to find the root cause of their indecorums, he does not seek to wrest answers from their actions, but merely holds up a mirror to them. Therein lies the mastery of Balzac. In the hotel, Paquita asks Henri to dress in women’s clothes, to which henri complies. Nowhere before this takes place, is the girl’s sexuality hinted at. It is a common misconception, that Balzac unduly interferes with his characters and instead of letting them peel their layers through their actions, he tells it all. An opinion very much incogrous with the way Balzac portrays the characters in The Girl with the golden eyes. Here, Balzac never assists us in forming our opinions of Henri or Paquita. The story reaches a crescendo in the the end: The mother of the girl turns out to be an unfeeling Georgian slave, who was bought at a slave trade in Caucasus, Henri’s own sister, the love interest of Paquita, Henri has a sexual conduct with his own sister, Paquita is violently killed by Henri’s sister. It is a slow descent into maddness and unruliness. I cannot think of another literary work from the nineteenth century, that, to again call up the greeks, portrays the psyche so realisticly. There are books I read, from which I seem to retain very little, yet can appriciate their greatness, and there are books, that leave an indelible mark on me. The Girl with the Golden eyes belongs to the latter category.
To read Balzac is to be imparted a secret insight into the way the things are. James joyce considered him quaint and slyly remarked that no one reads his works anymore. While it would probably take years to read through the entirity of The human comedy, as the number of novels and stories amount to more than 90, it suffices to read the ones, that have aged well, among which, I think, The Girl with the Golden eyes has done that the best. There is nothing quite like it in literature.
* Peter Collier’s translation
