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<Nineteenth Century French Studies 30.1&2 (2001) 182-184



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Book Review

Traité de la vie élégante


Balzac, Honoré de. Traité de la vie élégante. Edition présentée par Marie-Christine Natta. Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2000. Pp. 170. ISBN 2-84516-135-2

The Comédie humaine plays such a large role in the Balzacian imagination that any textual fragment falling outside the Comédie's totalizing sphere may seem insig-nificant. Traité de la vie élégante, an unfinished series of articles written in 1830 for the magazine La Mode, is one such fragment. But as Balzac is so fond of reminding us, any fragment can lead to the whole. And like one of Cuvier's bones, from which an entire animal is reconstructed, the Traité gives us various hints to Balzac's larger literary universe. Its division of society into the haves and have-nots of elegance (axiom XIV, alas, lists "les professeurs d'humanités" among the latter) reveals Balzac's taste for vast systems of social classification, such as the one we find in the early passages of La Fille aux yeux d'or. The Traité's detailed semiotics of fashion, or "vestignomie," prefigures the Lavater-based descriptions sprinkled throughout Balzac's novels. Most importantly, though, this miscellany of aphorisms and anec-dotes promotes, paradoxically, the very idea of unity that underlies La Comédie humaine. Before the Avant-propos' philosophico-literary borrowing of Saint-Hilaire's "unité de composition," Balzac had declared in a lighter tone: "Le principe constitutif de l'élégance est l'unité" (Aphorism XX).

Traité de la vie élégante can be found in most Œuvres complètes editions alongside "Théorie de la démarche" and "Traité des excitants modernes." According to Balzac's wishes, the three essays together were to make up the "Pathologie de la vie sociale." In 1971, Roger Kempf unhitched the Traité de la vie élégante from its team, pairing it instead with two later texts on dandyism: Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Du Dandysme et de George Brummell" (1845) and Baudelaire's "Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863). As of 2000, we now have a compact edition of the Traité by itself, presented by Marie-Christine [End Page 182] Natta, a noted authority on dandy culture who has edited texts by Barbey and authored La Grandeur sans conviction: essai sur le dandysme (1991) and La Mode (1996). It is part of the "Textes" series of social science documents put out by the newly-formed (1999) Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal. As befits the series, Natta's Preface and notes emphasize the sociological aspects of the text and its genesis.

Generally considered a frivolous trifle, even among Balzac scholars, the Traité is a curious little text, full of quips and turns. Its tonal mix of scholastic jargon, earnest exhortations to elegance, and tongue-in-cheek frivolity can leave one unsure of how seriously to take it. But Natta does a good job of anchoring the text in its historical and political milieu in such a way as to draw out its more substantial ramifications. The result is an appealing volume, useful as reference, entertainment, or teaching tool.

Asserting that the Traité "est incontestablement lié aux circonstances qui l'ont fait naître," Natta embeds the text within a history of the magazine La Mode for which it was commissioned (by editor-in-chief Emile de Girandin). Her well-researched Preface gives us an informative and entertaining glimpse into the gossipy world of what Rose Fortassier, in her notes to the Pléiade edition, calls "les coulisses du journalisme jeune et conquérant." Anecdotes and quotations culled from articles, correspondence and archival documents detail the birth of the magazine itself, Bal-zac's dealings with its editors, and La Mode's post-Revolutionary politics and targeted reading public (not the provincial wives of the earlier Journal des Dames et des Modes, but an aristocratic and legitimist readership of both sexes in Paris).

The contextualization is useful, but to my mind even more compelling is the...

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