Balzac’s Second-Rate Muse

Balzac’s Second-Rate Muse Allan H. Pasco A DULTERY AND MARRIAGE, apostasy and faith, journalism and literature: in other times and in other hands such themes might have drawn eloquent praise or outrage. But this is Balzac’s La Muse du département (1843) in a period when he thought the Church had lost the sense of its high calling, when its priests were willing to serve debased desires for social position and wealth,1and when “ votre infâme littérature,” according to M. de Clagny, “ repose sur l’adultère” (680). Balzac raises the issues less to comment on religion and art than to vili­ pend journalism. One might think newspapers and reviews represent a subject of ephemeral, thus, minor importance. Still, because journalism is merely a semblance of art, in Balzac’s recasting of Plato,2it degrades much that it touches. Balzac announces with heavy disdain that its prac­ titioners belong to “ ce groupe d’écrivains appelés du nom defaiseurs ou hommes de métier. En littérature, à Paris, de nos jours, le métier est une démission donnée de toutes prétentions à une place quelconque” (933). Bardèche offers a capsule description of Etienne Lousteau, the exem­ plar journalist picked up from Illusions perdues (1837-43) and high­ lighted in La Muse: he is a man “ qui ne croit à rien, le courriériste qui a traîné dans toutes les coulisses, une sorte de fille facile de la bohème littéraire, qui a pris l’habitude de mettre en toute chose son âme de pros­ tituée.” 3Shortly after his arrival in Sancerre, Lousteau makes a telling distinction between journalism and literature. Some proofs have arrived. Dinah asks, “ Comment! la littérature vous poursuit jusqu’ici?” “ Non,” Lousteau responds, “ pas la littérature,” but rather the next installment of a story he has coming out in a review (703). Later, the narrator makes the point patent for anyone who has not understood: Lousteau “ tra­ vaillait à trois ou quatre journaux littéraires. Mais, rassurez-vous! il ne mettait aucune conscience d’artiste à ses productions” (733). He is vain (786), lazy (759), lacks courage (763) and willpower (759). As he says himself, “ Je suis, littérairement parlant, un homme très secondaire” (770), and as the narrator pronounces in a significant contrast, he is “ un auteur du second ordre, . . . l’un des feuilletonistes les plus distingués” (631). It is then suitable that Lousteau’s name suggest a loustic, a profes­ sional fool or facetious person, and that he would become involved not Vol. XXXI, No. 3 67 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r with la Muse, not even with “la Muse française,” but with Dinah, “ la Muse du département.” Perhaps even more cruelly, because the name of Dinah’s home village of Saint-Satur brings together the images of satur­ nalia and holiness, this poetess is referred to as the Sappho of SaintSatur .4 She is “ une de ces cent et une dixièmes muses qui ornent les départements” (735), a second-rate muse, thus perfectly appropriate for a second-rate writer. The novel’s early working title, Dinah Piédefer, was soon changed to the definitive La Muse du département. Balzac wrote Achille Brindeau on 12 March 1843 that the new title was “ plus comique et plus explicite.” Certainly, it draws ironic attention to the arts. I suspect there was another reason for the change, however: because the novelist’s onomas­ tics were perfectly obvious to him, so much so in fact that he assumed his audience would read his names as easily as his stories,5 he may have turned away from Dinah Piédefer because it overly emphasizes apostasy to the detriment of the novel’s primary focus on journalism and the degradation of art. Dinah’s biblical eponym was, of course, Jacob’s and Leah’s daughter who, on going out to “ see the daughters of the land” (Gen. 34.1), was violated by Shechem, a Hivite and the son of Hamor. Though Shechem loved and wanted to marry Dinah, she had been “ de­ filed” (Gen. 34.2). The Hebrew...