À l’écoute du jeune Balzac. L’écho des premières œuvres publiées (1822–1829) by Roland Chollet, and Stéphane Vachon (review)

Roland Chollet and Stéphane Vachon propose to focus on Balzac’s first years as a writer, from the composition of L’Héritière de Birague (1822) to the publication of Le Dernier Chouan (1830), which marks the beginning of what would become La Comédie humaine. This volume is thoroughly documented and focuses on the literary milieu in which the young Balzac started his career as a writer, critic, and publisher. The authors examine the book market of the time and the reception of Balzac’s first texts, which consisted mainly of romans noirs and adventure novels inspired partly by Anglophone popular successes (Ann Radcliffe and Walter Scott’s novels in particular). Chollet and Vachon have also compiled an extensive list of advertisements and articles related to young Balzac’s novels and essays; these journalistic texts from the 1820s are reprinted in the volume and constitute about half of it.

The two main studies of Balzac’s early years are Maurice Bardèche, Balzac Romancier: La formation de l’art du roman chez Balzac jusqu’à la publication du Père Goriot (1820–1835) (1947), and Pierre Barbéris, Aux Sources de Balzac: Les romans de jeunesse (1965). Bardèche focused on the literary influences that marked the young Balzac’s first prose, but paid little attention to their reception. Pierre Barbéris also looked at the novels of the period while occasionally describing the reception of Balzac’s first texts. Barbéris did not, however, conduct research as thorough as that of Chollet and Vachon; they rectify his sometimes abrupt statements on the indifference Balzac’s first writings are said to have encountered. Another methodological difference between the two studies is that Barbéris saw continuity between these texts and Balzac’s later works, while Vachon and Chollet make a point of examining them for themselves and through the careful study of the genres, market imperatives, and readership of the period.

À l’écoute du jeune Balzac has two parts, the first of which studies the literary, economic, and biographical context in which these early texts were published. This section serves as an introduction to the reviews and articles reproduced in the second part of the book. Vachon and Chollet provide the reader with a welldocumented history of the book market during the Restoration, seeking to explain the constraints by which Lord R’hoone and Saint Aubin (two pseudonyms used by Balzac during this decade) had to abide. Cabinets de lecture constituted the main readership of these first novels and influenced both their conception and reception. Chollet and Vachon extensively quote publishers and writers on the subject. They also comment on writers’ dissatisfaction with the market imperatives that impinged on their writings; the subversive use that authors—including the young Balzac—made of prefaces gives an idea of that frustration, and the volume documents that practice, quoting from the popular writers of the period—Ducange, d’Arlincourt, and Paul de Kock in particular—all of whom were to appear a decade later in the dialogues of Illusions perdues. The book also examines the ways in which these novels were advertised: most of the time writers had to organize and pay for such publicity. This is a practice that Illusions perdues subsequently described at length, which is why Chollet and Vachon repeatedly include and quote from the novel.

The texts under study here also include some early political writings and reviews of the books released by Balzac’s publishing company between 1825 and 1827. In addition, the volume offers an interesting chapter on the story behind the 1836 re-edition of Horace de Saint-Aubin’s complete works, at a time when Balzac had established a solid reputation writing under his own name.

The reviews and critical...