Schooling for the People Comparative Local Studies of Schooling History in France and German... Book

Balzac is an author whose individual works can run the gamut from ill-conceived and hastily constructed to sublimely powerful novels such as Pere Goriot, Lost Illusions, A Harlot High and Low, Cousin Bette, and Cousin Pons. And I would also have to add The Wrong Side of Paris, which required a re-reading to appreciate its power. Yet, even Balzac's inferior works have their place: This is because the Comédie Humaine is like a vast continuum illuminated by greater lights and lesser lights. A vast cast of characters jumps from stories to novels and back again, and the lesser lights frequently illuminate the greater ones.

In the 51 short years of his life, Balzac burned like a candle lit at both ends. He wrote with a passion that is wholly absent from literature in English. To miss having read him is to miss a unique perspective on the Promethean world that swings like a pendulum between the material and the spiritual. Reading him requires care, particularly when one is deeply involved in the minutiae of a grand conspiracy bringing together obscure points of French law and economic transactions of the period.

The Wrong Side of Paris is one of the author's few attempts to depict goodness triumphant. (The only other example I can think of at this moment is his The Country Doctor.) Just as the evil conspiracies in many of his most famous novels have a muscular drive to them, so also does the goodness of the secret group formed around Mme de la Chanterie. Influenced by the charitable work of St. Vincent de Paul and the society named after him in the 1830s, Balzac sees a secret, almost Masonic, order of powerful individuals who seek out people who are at one and the same time besieged by poverty and worthy of help.

In the first half of the book, the hero, known to us only by his first name, Godefroid, is drawn to this circle and becomes ever more involved as he becomes more fascinated with the story of Mme de la Chanterie. In the second half, he is sent to help a desperate former lawyer known at first only as M Bernard whose daughter Vanda has a rare nervous disease and who has not left her tenement room for many years. The daughter's room is elegantly decorated, even as her father and son live in slumlike conditions in the adjoining rooms. Godefroid manages to alleviate the conditions of M Bernard and his family, until he runs into a shocking revelation, which I will not reveal here.

This is one of Balzac's last completed novels and a kind of Valentine to the Polish Countess, Eveline Hanska, whom he was pursuing and eventually married -- only to die shortly after. Perhaps for this reason he employed more care in The Wrong Side of Paris than in many of his earlier novels. Even so, there are a few slip-ups, which translator Jordan Stump documents in his excellent end notes.