Les Boudoirs dans l'œuvre d'Honoré de Balzac: surveiller, mentir, désirer, mourir by Jean-François Richer (review)

This volume contributes to a hermeneutics of place and space in Balzac. Although much has already been written on Balzac's topographies—his representations of Paris and the provinces, his evocations of landscapes, deserts, and forests, and travel/transport in La Comédie humaine — relatively little has been said on the organization of his internal, 'domestic' spaces, which, in the new bourgeois age, assumed ever greater importance in the coding of individual status and social relationships. Taking the boudoir as his point of entry into Balzac's representation of internal spaces is particularly rewarding for Jean-François Richer since, as a bridge and a barrier between frequently ill-lit and inaccessible bedrooms and brightly illuminated salons, the boudoir is a modest but highly charged location where distinctions between public and private, male and female, the permitted and the prohibited are constantly (re-)negotiated. Like the estate of Les Aigues in Les Paysans and the forests of Nodesme in Une ténébreuse affaire, the boudoir is a conflicted space where hierarchies of power — sexual, territorial, and narrative — are enforced and challenged. In four successive chapters entitled 'Surveiller', 'Mentir', 'Désirer', and 'Mourir', Richer charts different aspects of the boudoir. In 'Surveiller' he shows that the intimacy of the boudoir is always exposed to interruption and intrusion by servants, husbands (the boudoir is nearly always 'feminine'), and other prying eyes; its door is, therefore, often kept open and its supposed privacy made public. In 'Mentir', Richer shows that 'les tromperies du décor' (p. 128) are repeated in the play-acting of its often reclining, deceptively languorous residents such as the Duchesse de Langeais: '[l]e boudoir, en quelque sorte, semble "faire" la comédienne' (p. 137). Perhaps more unexpectedly, the next chapter, 'Désirer', shows that Balzac differs from his eighteenth-century predecessors in making the boudoir a site of thwarted rather than fulfilled desire: 'le boudoir fait plutôt obstacle à l'amour' (p. 167). In the boudoir, men are repeatedly silenced, emasculated, and infantilized — unless, like de Marsay, Ronquerolles, and Rastignac, they use their boudoir experiences to re-empower themselves as dandies and as narrators. Finally, in 'Mourir', Richer ingeniously demonstrates that 'le boudoir est l'antichambre de la mort' (p. 254), whether because, as in La Fille aux yeux d'or, the boudoir is a site of murder, or because the male boudeur is suffocated as in the Laocoön, or poisoned by the viperous language to which he is exposed in this toxic site: 'Même les êtres puissants sont fragiles dans l'intimité piégée du boudoir' (p. 257). Although, then, the boudoir theme might have seemed as limited as its own topography, it offers highly fertile terrain when examined by as skilled and well-informed a reader as Richer. His study could have been more clearly positioned in terms of gender theory, socio-criticism and psycho-criticism. However, as thematic criticism in the manner of Jean-Pierre Richard and Albert Béguin, this book presents a searching and subtle reading of Balzac.