Balzac’s La Muse du département: The Status of Fiction

Balzac’s La Muse du département: The Status of Fiction Anthony R. Pugh L A MUSE DU DÉPARTEMENT is relatively little studied, and usually with a genetic bias, as the history of the text is particularly complex and fascinating. The intricacies are unravelled in two critical editions published in the seventies.1 Three major articles on La Muse show a movement away from the genetic into the structural or thematic. Michel Butor, in one of the essays in Repertoire (1967), talked about the stories told in part II of the novel, and the proportion of genetic considerations to structural is about even. Nicole Mozet, in a chapter of her 1982 study of “ la ville de province,” gives about 15% of her space to genetic matters, and Patrick Berthier, in an essay on the role of money published the following year, is 100% thematic. So is the most recent study, accounting for Dinah’s “ inconsis­ tencies” from a feminist standpoint.2 My approach here will be structural, and will explore more fully than Butor the implications of fictions within the novel, seeing La Muse du département as a very suggestive statement about the novelist’s art, about realism, and the relation of fiction to “ fact.” I shall say a little about the history of the text, in my opening and closing remarks, partly because it helps to have the salient facts in mind, and partly because I believe that false conclusions have been drawn from the history of the text concerning the worth of the novel that emerged. The Fume edition of La Comédie humaine, begun in 1842, consisted chiefly of revised editions of old texts, plus some new ones. La Muse was a bit of both: a greatly amplified version of a work written to complete the Scènes de la vie de province of 1836-37, it also calls on two journalistic pieces published independently. Furthermore, the 1837 publication was itself hastily put together from texts already written: it comprised three récits and a frame, and the three récits had already been published twice, using two different frames. Hence the oft repeated notion that La Muse is thrown together, a rag-bag which is less than perfectly unified. My contention is that this undervalues the novel. Such knowledge may explain certain features, but the only way to decide whether the work is coherent or not is by studying and assimilating the text as it 60 F a l l 1991 P u g h stands, without preconceptions. The parts Balzac borrowed from himself to my mind do not detract from the unity, they add to it, making the pat­ terns more intricate. The thematic clusters identified in the four articles mentioned above interact with each other. Here I shall limit myself to the theme of fiction, which I regard as central. Part II of La Muse is the 1837 kernel, and the aesthetic ideas touched upon there radiate to all the other parts. In the real world, we can read La Muse du département, as we can read Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe; and in La Muse we come across characters who read Adolphe too. Balzac plays constantly with this mirror-effect, making the novel, from one perspective, an enquiry into the status of fiction and reality. The novel concerns Etienne Lousteau who, holidaying with Bianchon in Sancerre, suspects that Dinah de La Baudraye, hostess of the town’s most prestigious artistic salon, is unhappily married. In the 1843 version she becomes his mistress at the end of Part II and returns with him to Paris, and their life together is fully described in Part III. Part II contains among other things two poems and four récits. The first poem is entitled Paquita, and is written by Mme de La Baudraye. It is patently a transposition of her own frustrated life, the elements reshuf­ fled and given new identities. It was explicitly undertaken as a form of therapy (184, 189). A beautiful Spanish girl follows her lover (a French soldier) to Rouen. The author gives a “ magnificent description” of Rouen (185), although she has herself never been there. The lover is drafted...