The Devil's Comedy - The Pact: Two Grotesques • Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac is a recurring topic on this blog, which is because he’s one of my favorite authors and I keep coming back to his work. His vast cycle, The Human Comedy, consists of over 90 novels and countless characters he brings back again and again, together forming a portrait of French society during the Restoration. His stories are gripping and absorbing, and all are told superbly well. I can never get enough of Balzac, and when this little book with two short pieces more or less fell into my lap, I had to have it and read it. What’s special is that Balzac did not include these two grotesques in The Human Comedy. They belong to his early work, and what the reader gets here in brief form is something the keen Balzac reader will discover in the following lines.

This booklet contains two short stories of roughly 70 pages each. The Devil’s Comedy appeared in 1831 and is set in Hell, where the Devil decides to build a theater and have a comedy performed there by his attendants. The grotesque—“a distorted representation of reality”—is structured in two parts and satirically alludes to political and philosophical events. Originally published in two periodicals, it matched the taste of the day, which was very receptive to witty, intellectual satire. It’s studded with barbs, full of mockery and allusions. As the afterword aptly notes, its style is roughly what today we’d call political cabaret, “which holds up an unmasking mirror to politics with intelligent, subtle punchlines and pointed barbs” (cf. p. 142). That captures it well.

This first grotesque only partly won me over. It has numerous references to the political and philosophical situations and insights of the time that really are often funny and make you smile. Even just considering who, in Balzac’s view, sits in Hell and who dwells in heavenly paradise is rather quirky. Or when Louis XVIII and Napoleon chatter in the audience and Napoleon waves it away, asking why he “kept tangling with all that nonsense up there” (p. 46). At the same time, the story lives precisely from this satire, and for many of the connections I simply lacked the historical background to catch the fine points. The edition does provide very helpful and good notes, which I repeatedly used as a reference while reading, but even so they’re often not enough to savor all the nuances.

The Pact, published in 1821, is a first-person narrative by a young Spaniard who makes a deal with the Devil and gains the ability to slip into the skin of any person, essentially taking over that life and carrying it forward. The dissatisfied young man then tries out various lives he longs for and recounts what he experiences there. I found this short story quite entertaining. It’s interesting to see how the young, ambitious, and not-so-virtuous Spaniard learns his lessons and, in the end, arrives at a truly bizarre résumé. Some well-known figures take a jab or two here as well, but overall the focus is on the storyline and the protagonist’s experiences.

The afterword of this little volume is highly recommended, as it places these two grotesques within the context of Balzac’s entire oeuvre. It’s well known that Balzac repeatedly lived rather extravagantly and just as repeatedly had money troubles. To bring cash in, he tried all sorts of ventures. Despite the sharp criticism he often leveled at journalism in his works, he himself repeatedly wrote for newspapers and magazines. With high productivity he kept turning out articles, and out of this drive these two pieces emerged, tailored to the tastes of contemporary readers. In this book, readers have the chance to get to know this lesser-known side of Balzac.

All told, the two texts didn’t truly excite me. For me, Balzac stands for his exciting novels of The Human Comedy, in which he masterfully characterizes people from all walks of life and always embeds them in a thrilling plot. He also repeatedly abstracts, casting philosophical and very human traits in a general light, which gives the books immense depth. That combination simply isn’t present in these two grotesques. On the one hand, I found it fascinating to see where the roots of that very abstracting gaze come from and how Balzac honed his writerly dexterity. But it does come at the expense of reading pleasure. It’s also unfair to compare these texts to his great novels—yet somehow I do so automatically, because when a book says Balzac on the cover, I think of the novels that blew me away. A Daughter of Eve, Ursule Mirouët, Honorine, or Béatrix are some of my absolute favorites and books I won’t soon forget. These two grotesques can’t be compared with such masterpieces.

I think it’s terrific that Ulrich Esser-Simon has made these little-known and long-lost works accessible to German readers. With the notes and afterword, the book is a well-rounded package, and thanks to the cloth binding and ribbon marker it also makes a fine gift.

Conclusion: With the two grotesques The Devil’s Comedy and The Pact, readers get two stories steeped in political and philosophical barbs and rich satire. Much like political cabaret, Balzac holds a mirror up to the society of his time. That worked well back then, with its contemporary context, but today it often misses its mark. It’s exciting to encounter a Balzac beyond The Human Comedy—one who wrote for the journalism of his day to make a living and thereby gradually reached the literary skill that makes his life’s work an imperishable masterpiece. A book I can heartily recommend to readers already enthusiastic about Balzac. For those just getting to know this great novelist—or only lukewarm on him—this little volume is less suitable.

Book information: The Devil’s Comedy — The Pact: Two Grotesques • Honoré de Balzac • marix Verlag • 160 pages • ISBN 9783737410786