La Physiologie du Mariage, the first of his works to arouse attention, supplemented Brillat-Savarin's harmless Physiologie du Goût with a half-jocose, half-scientific, wholly coarse analysis of that institution of society which French literature from time immemorial has treated as a butt for witticisms, an object of ironical homage, and a matter for unsparing investigation. Balzac regards it in the light of a tragi-comic social necessity, defends it, and assists it with good advice in its struggle with those destructive elements, masculine and feminine caprices and passions. Marriage has a special attraction for Balzac as being the battle-ground of two egoisms; he rushes with the ruthlessness of a wild boar through its boundless domain of attractions and repulsions, snuffing and poking his nose into everything. In France marriage has always been a tolerably external, public matter; it need not surprise us that Balzac has little reverence for its mysteries. He writes of them with Molière's outspokenness, but less healthily—more pessimistically and more grossly. The book is full of clever, coarse conceits and laughable anecdotes, and is often extremely amusing from the contrast between the frivolous, licentious matter and the professorial or father-confessor style in which it is expounded by the youthful lecturer on the science of marriage. It is, nevertheless, an immature production of a writer who has been early robbed of all beautiful illusions; and it must certainly be a repulsive book to most readers of the female sex, though we are told that a considerable proportion of its contents was communicated to the author by two women, neither of them young—Madame Hamelin and Madame Sophie Gay. La Physiologie du Mariage reveals none of Balzac's nobility of thought and delicacy of feeling—nothing but his gift of ruthless, searching analysis.
It would seem as if the opening of his authorial vein in this book had freed him for a long time from bad blood. His conception of life is henceforward a more elevated one, or rather, it divides itself into two conceptions, a serious and a sportive. The serious and the sensually cynic philosophy of human life, which in La Physiologie du Mariage blent into one repulsive whole, now separate, displaying themselves in the form of tragedy and satyric comedy. In 1831 he both writes his first philosophic novel, La Peau de Chagrin (which laid the foundation of his fame as an author) and begins, with La belle Impéria, the long series of the Contes drôlatiques, a collection of tales in the freest Renaissance style, reminiscent of Queen Marguerite and Brantôme in matter and of Rabelais in language. Told in the language of our own day, they would be both disgusting and dull; but the grand, simple, old-fashioned prose style, which lends more nobility to the subject than even the severest metrical forms, metamorphoses these deifications of the flesh into genuine works of art, burlesque as the tales told by one of those worldly-minded, handy, jovial monks who swarm in the legendary lore of every country.
In one of the masterly prologues to this collection of tales the author tells how, having lost his patrimony in his youth, and being reduced to the direst poverty, he cried to heaven, like the woodcutter in the fable who had lost his axe, in hopes that the gods might take pity on him and give him another axe. What Mercury threw down to him was an ink-horn, on which were engraved the three letters AVE. He stood turning the heavenly gift round and round in his hands until he caught sight of the letters backwards, EVA. What was Eva? What but all women in one? A heavenly voice had called to him: "Think of woman; she will heal thy woes and fill thy pockets; she is thy fortune, thy property. Ave, I salute thee! Eva, O woman!" Which, being interpreted, meant that what he was now to attempt was to win a smile from the unprejudiced reader by mad and merry love stories. And he succeeded. In none of his other writings did his style attain such brilliance and vigour; Rubens's colouring is not bolder nor richer, and Rubens hardly equals this herculean wantonness with his fauns and drunken bacchantes. But it is difficult to find ten successive lines that are fit for quotation or reading aloud.
La Peau de Chagrin is Balzac's first literary tussle with the reality of his age; it is a spirited, many-sided work, rich in germs and shoots; and with its fine, simple symbols it anticipates that almost comprehensive picture of modern society which its author was to give to the world in his complete works. The externalities of modern life, such as the theatre and the fashionable lady's boudoir; the dissatisfied and hopeless poverty of the talented young author thrown into relief by the orgies of wealthy journalists and women of the demi-monde; the contrast, in the two principal female characters, between the worldly and the loving heart—all this is shown us in a strange, fantastic light. The book consists of a few connected gaudy spectacular scenes; there is more reflection and symbolic art than plastic talent in it. The youthful hero, who is on the point of committing suicide in despair over his hopeless poverty, receives from an aged dealer in curiosities a piece of wild ass's skin, on which neither steel nor fire produces the smallest effect, and which secures to its possessor the fulfilment of his every wish, but which shrinks a line or two with the gratification of each; simultaneously with the final disappearance of the ass's skin the life of its owner comes to an end. The persuasive powers of a marvellous imagination have succeeded in imparting credibility to the supernatural part of this profound allegory. Balzac has given the fantastic element in it a form which permits of its blending with the modern realistic elements, Aladdin's lamp, when it was rubbed, instantly worked a direct miracle; even in Oehlenschläger's Aladdin it supersedes the law of cause and effect. Not so the ass's skin; it does nothing directly; it only ensures the fortunate issue of events, steadily shrinking the while. It seems to be made of the fabric of which our lives are composed. The gradual annihilation of the human being is brought about, we are told, by two instinctive actions, which exhaust its sources of life. "Deux verbes expriment toutes les formes que prennent ces deux causes de mort: vouloir et pouvoir. Vouloir nous brûle et pouvoir nous détruit." That is to say, we die at last because we go on killing ourselves every day.
The ass's skin is, like ourselves, at last annihilated by "vouloir et pouvoir." With real profundity Balzac shows in this powerful representation of the chief impulse of the younger generation of his day—to drink the cup of life greedily to the very dregs—what emptiness there is in satiety, how certain it is that death lies cowering in the satisfaction of desire. Youthful, fertile, suggestive, and vaguely melancholy, like all books produced by genius before the acquirement of personal experience, La Peau de Chagrin made its mark abroad as well as in France. Goethe read it during the last year of his life. Riemer (who attributes the authorship of the book to Victor Hugo) reports Goethe to have said on October 11, 1831: "I have been reading more of La Peau de Chagrin. It is an excellent work in the newest style, distinguished by the vigour and cleverness of its back-and-forward movement between the impossible and the painful, and by the logical manner in which the marvellous is employed in producing the most extraordinary chains of thought and events, of which, taken in detail, much that is favourable might be said." In a letter of the 17th November of the same year he writes of the same work: "This book, the production of an intellect of very high order, points to a deep-seated, incurable corruption in the French nation, which will spread steadily unless the provinces, which can neither read nor write, restore it to health again, as far as that is possible." (Goethe-Jahrbuch, 1880, pp. 287, 289.)
The novel contains not a little autobiography. Balzac knew from his own experience the feelings of the impecunious youth, who, descending from his garret, picks his way in his solitary pair of white silk stockings and dancing-shoes across the muddy street, in deadly fear of being splashed by a passing carriage, and consequently deprived of the sight of his beloved. But what interests us more, is the sum of inward experience which is contained in the book, and which amounts to this: Society detests misfortune and suffering, avoids them like infectious diseases, never hesitates in choosing between a misfortune and a crime. Let a misfortune be never so sublime, society will manage to belittle it, to make it ridiculous by some witty sally; it has no sympathy to spare for the fallen gladiator. To Balzac, in short, even now in his youth, society appears devoid of every higher religious or moral feeling; it shrinks from the old, the sick, and the poor; it does homage to luck, to strength, and, above all, to wealth; it tolerates no misfortune out of which it cannot by some means or other coin money.
Before Balzac's day the novel had occupied itself almost exclusively with one theme—love; but the god of Balzac's contemporaries was money; therefore in his books money, or rather the lack of money, the desire of money, is the pivot on which society turns. The idea was audacious and novel. To enter in a work of fiction, a romance, into accurate details regarding the incomes and expenditure of the principal characters, in short, to treat money as of prime importance, was a perfectly new departure; and many denounced it as prosaic, nay, coarse; for it is always considered coarse to say what every one thinks, and what consequently all have tacitly agreed to conceal or to prevaricate about—and especially coarse to proclaim it in an art which is often regarded as the art of beautiful lying.