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French Writers Were ON ONE in the Mid-19th Century
Very few skips
Albertine, 972 Fifth Avenue
Of the dozen French novels I’ve read on this spring-summer run so far, I can honestly recommend almost all of them (very few skips!). Below, I’ve organized them loosely into themes, listed in chronological order by setting (how I prefer to read).
Parisian high society
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos is (still) spicy! Edgy! Scorpio-tastic!
Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac is a sad one.
The Red and the Black by Stendhal was one I hadn’t heard of, but is a solid, fast-paced read that covers a lot of ground.
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant is an appropriate finale to this list.
Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo, translated by Alban Krailsheimer, which I wrote a little about before
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, translated by Christine Donougher really is an epic of the human condition. Never seen the play or movies!
Germinal by Émile Zola for all you socialists out there! Please avoid the bowdlerized Vizetelly and Havelock Ellis translations! I went with Peter Collier’s from 1993 (God bless the ‘90s).
Unabridged or bust!
Marriage (lol)
Indiana by George Sand is sadly the only book written by a woman that I read in this run, but it’s a good one and easy to recommend.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert didn’t quite hit for me, but it makes an amusing pair with Nana.
Nana by Émile Zola (translated by Helen Constantine) is Moulin Rouge! for grown ups.
Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant
My notes on Count of Monte Cristo (contains spoilers!). Graphite on A4 Rhodia graph paper. Could I sell cleaned-up versions of these?
Adventure and intrigue
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas is a pretty good yarn! Easier but shallower than Monte Cristo.
Reading The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (translated by Robin Buss) showed me that the 2002 film does not do this epic plot justice. Eugenie deserves a spin-off!
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Libertines
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The Confessions of a Child of the Century by Alfred de Musset is more of introspective libertine? Also, it pairs well with Indiana, since the authors were lovers.
Émile Zola’s Nana is here for a good time not a long time.
Which editions to get
I’ve been preferring modern translations (last 40 years, say), especially for Zola, who seems to have been bowdlerized by early translators. Generally speaking, I found that Oxford World’s Classics has well-reviewed French-to-English translations.
Some sociological thoughts, as a treat
I hadn’t realized had many regime changes France went through in the 1800s! So society seems to have been both very hierarchical, but also reasonably dynamic, since who was on top politically would shift suddenly every 20 years or so.
Lot of affairs! Affairs-as-networking. An economy of affairs, even.
Interestingly, it seems like the easiest way for a young man to “make it” in 19th-century France was to go to Paris and find a rich, older woman to grant him to access to a network of powerful people, sometimes in exchange for extramarital sex? Sacre bleu! All while the (usually older) husband, perhaps already sleeping in separate bedrooms (or “apartments”), would endeavor to “preserve his ignorance,” as one of my Zola translations puts it.
Chance, fate, and inheritance
More so than the Russian and English novels I read last year, the French seem to be interested in fate and chance. Even the libertines would use the concept to seduce women, persuading them their love is fated, or that the man’s fate is in the hands of the woman, etc.
Count of Monte Cristo in particular took things further, describing the Count, in his mission of revenge, as not merely right-hand of a vengeful God or “fate,” but a master of chance, thanks in part to his extraordinary skills in anticipating the future and how others would act in certain situations.
Later in the century, Zola uses the then-new science of biological inheritance as an exciting and new addition to this question of fate.
[By the 1880s,] Zola was now hailed as a leader of the naturalist school; he defined his aesthetic principles in [The Experimental Novel]. Naturalism involved the application to literature of two scientific principles: determinism, or the belief that character, temperament, and ultimately behavior are determined by the forces of hereditary, environment, and the historical moment; and the experimental method, which entailed the objective recording of precise data in controlled conditions… Heredity, as a modern-day version of fate, was a major element [in Zola’s novels]… Zola thought of himself as a scientist, “an anatomist of the soul and the flesh,” "an “observer” whose only concern was truth, and who borrowed analytic and experimental methods from the modern sciences.
Whether, in his eagerness to make literature more “scientific,” Zola veers into Social Darwinist / eugenics territory would be an interesting thesis!
Up next: Dipping that madeleine, once again
A few years ago, I was in the lobby of the Lincoln Center AMC and someone dropped a full Heinken, instantly transporting me back to college.
When I was a sweet young lad of 18 I read Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s epic In Search of Lost Time, in an Oxford dorm. Hopefully I’ve done enough preliminary reading on Parisian society to get more out of it this time (if you know you know). I even splurged on a Rhodia notepad of A3 dot paper (16.5” by 12.5”!) in an effort to keep track of all the characters and their complex relationships this time. I’m excited!