A Treasure Trove of Suppressed Feeling

Rob Latham reviews Peter Bush’s new translation of Honoré de Balzac’s novel “The Lily in the Valley” for NYRB Classics.

By Rob LathamJuly 23, 2024

• Fiction

GRAHAM ROBB CONCLUDES his superb 1994 biography of Honoré de Balzac by observing that, after two ambitious ventures in the 1890s to translate all of the author’s vast corpus into English, most of Balzac’s work—save for a handful of frequently reprinted and retranslated titles—has since lapsed into relative obscurity. As a result, Robb asserts, “unknown masterpieces are waiting to be rediscovered.” Over the past two decades, NYRB Classics has made an admirable effort to rectify this neglect, bringing out four books with texts that have been newly translated, in some cases for the first time in over a century: The Unknown Masterpiece (trans. Richard Howard, 2000), a gathering of two novelettes that focus on art and artists; The Human Comedy (trans. Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump, 2014), a gathering of 14 shorter works, including the brilliant novella The Duchesse de Langeais (1834); The Memoirs of Two Young Wives (trans. Jordan Stump, 2018), a luscious epistolary novel from 1842; and now The Lily in the Valley (trans. Peter Bush), a poignant 1836 novel that is one of the author’s most autobiographical.

Most extant translations of Balzac’s major novels, such as those featured in the Penguin Classics series, hail from the middle of the last century. Even the 1890s translations, most by Katherine Prescott Wormeley and Ellen Marriage (the latter writing under a male pseudonym when the work was deemed too salacious), continue to be reprinted, their public domain status making them the cheapest options available. Aside from the NYRB Classics volumes, you can count on one hand the new translations that have appeared in the 21st century. In 2003, Random House issued, in their Modern Library series, Jordan Stump’s translation of Balzac’s final novel, here titled The Wrong Side of Paris (a.k.a. The Seamy Side of History, 1848); in 2012, Oxford World Classics released Helen Constantine’s translation of the author’s strange ethicopolitical allegory The Wild Ass’s Skin (1831), following this up in 2013 with Peter Collier’s translation of The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other Stories; and in 2020, the University of Minnesota Press brought out Raymond N. MacKenzie’s superlative translations of Lost Illusions (1837–43), probably Balzac’s finest novel, and its rather melodramatic sequel, here oddly retitled Lost Souls (a.k.a. Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, 1838–47), the two texts supplemented with extensive notes. NYRB Classics has almost equaled that total with even their modest output, and one hopes, given the high quality of their translations and the many “unknown masterpieces” still lurking in the archives, that the press has many more new editions in store.

NYRB also published, in 2020, Peter Brooks’s excellent study Balzac’s Lives, which focuses on nine key characters in the “Comédie humaine,” the author’s convoluted network of roughly 100 texts offering a panoramic portrait of French society from the 1820s to the 1840s. It was Balzac’s great innovation to weave many of the same characters into the various panels of his epic tapestry, with the charming rake Eugène de Rastignac, the protagonist of Le Père Goriot (1835), appearing in no less than 28 separate works, sometimes centrally, sometimes marginally. The narrator of Lily in the Valley, Félix de Vandenesse, is not quite as ubiquitous, featuring in around a dozen texts, though Brooks curiously does not devote a chapter to him, instead focusing on Henriette de Mortsauf, Lily’s main female character—an odd decision since the countess appears, aside from a brief cameo in Lost Illusions, only in that book. Brooks’s discussion, though, is typically astute and penetrating, and one is grateful for any attention paid to this neglected novel, which is—as Geoffrey O’Brien says in his introduction—“perhaps the most lyrical of [Balzac’s] works.”

In their promotional materials for the volume, NYRB claims that Bush’s translation is “the first in over a century.” This is not quite correct. In 1957, Citadel Press released a new translation by Lucienne Hill, which was reprinted in paperback by Carroll & Graf in 1989; both editions promptly sank without a trace. Bush’s is certainly the only English translation currently in print that is not one of the hoary 1890s versions by Wormeley or Marriage. In the structural plan for the Comédie humaine that Balzac drew up in 1845, Lily is grouped with three other novels in the category “Scenes from Country Life,” and it is interesting to observe that those other three—The Country Doctor (1833), The Village Priest (1839), and The Peasants (1855; unfinished manuscript completed by the author’s widow)—have indeed not been retranslated in well over a century. This is likely because they reflect Balzac’s reactionary view of rural life as being made up of benighted agricultural workers in need of paternalistic improvement and instruction—and, as a result, tend to be overly didactic and sentimental. Some of this attitude bleeds into Lily, especially in the scenes where the Mortsaufs plan substantial renovations to their estate on the Indre River near Tours. But the novel mostly seems, in its focus on the lives and loves of a battered but resurgent aristocracy during the early years of the Bourbon Restoration, more in line with the texts grouped in the category “Scenes from Provincial Life,” which includes such classics as Lost Illusions and Eugénie Grandet (1834). In one version of Balzac’s schema, Lily was indeed gathered there, but the author decided to move it, perhaps to beef up a scantier tier, an unfortunate side effect being that this fine little novel has largely vanished into the sunny pastoral haze of the Touraine.

Balzac was born and grew up in Tours, and he would often return to the area in later life, usually when seeking refuge from angry creditors or frustrated publishers to whom he had made grandiose, impossible promises. As the lush descriptions of nature that stipple Lily in the Valley make plain, the region’s verdant landscapes were imprinted on the author’s heart, and the book reminds us that Balzac, usually seen as an ironic chronicler of the urban labyrinth of 19th-century Paris, also had a vivid feel for the sensory pleasures of country life. There is a wonderful, almost bacchanalian scene set during a grape harvest, and it is no coincidence that Félix communicates his forbidden love for Henriette via opulent bouquets of wildflowers, described with a simmering eroticism: “No declaration, no proof of ecstatic passion was so violently infectious as those symphonies of flowers […] What woman, inebriated by Aphrodite’s scent hiding in the vernal grass, could fail to understand that treasure trove of suppressed feeling[?]” The later scenes set in Paris, when Félix becomes a court favorite of Louis XVIII, seem almost pallid by comparison with these bucolic raptures.

As befits the mazy temporal structure of the Comédie, which often gives us (in Balzac’s words) “the middle of a life before its beginning, the beginning after its end,” Lily takes the form of a long memoir written by Félix to another countess, Natalie de Manerville. Natalie is a haughty woman whose loveless marriage was described in a previous novel, The Marriage Contract (1835), and for whom Félix conceives a callow passion outlined in a later novel, The Daughter of Eve (1839). His memoir has been requested by Natalie, who wants to know more about her brash admirer; as Félix tartly remarks, “You want my past and here you have it,” though the task has forced him to “revisit some hideous places.” These places include sites of Balzac’s own despised childhood: a loveless home dominated by a socially grasping mother and a mean-spirited governess, a snooty prep school filled with the endless taunts of his fellow students, and a chilly boarding school where he escaped into books to cope with his maltreatment and social exclusion. When Félix is sent by his mother to represent his impoverished noble family at a grand ball to welcome the return of a local duke exiled under Napoleon, the shy young man, overwhelmed by the experience, lurks on the margins of the scene. There he spies a beguilingly beautiful woman, whose “white, rounded shoulders […] gleam[ed] like silk.” Like a famished “infant [who] throws himself on his mother’s bosom,” the unloved boy impulsively kisses those bare shoulders, drawing an outraged and humiliating rebuke.

Not long after, Félix is sent to stay with a friend of his mother’s who lives in a château in the Indre Valley that, by a kind of fairy-tale logic, borders the estate of the woman at the ball. What ensues is, in Brooks’s words, “one of the strangest platonic relationships ever,” an “excruciating story of desire awakened and repressed.” Félix becomes, for Henriette, “less than a lover, but more than a brother,” chided for his amatory feelings and urged to embrace a chivalrous chastity, all the while being drawn inexorably into the family’s claustrophobic orbit. The Comte de Mortsauf, also recently returned from a grueling exile, is an abusive martinet prone to irrational tantrums and fiendishly adept at what we would now call gaslighting. He blames his wife for the precarious health of their two children, even though it is suggested that their debility derives from STDs the count himself contracted during his degenerate youth. The count winks at young Félix’s presence in his household, accepting him as “a mediator between his wife and himself” while at the same time making him witness to a “slow murder that went unpunished,” his furious tirades against Henriette seeming “like blows from an axe that rang out monotonously.”

As Brooks observes, the novel shows a trenchant pre-Freudian grasp of the psychological mechanisms of repression and sublimation. The frustrated Félix dreams of overcoming Henriette’s strict reserve, only to be repulsed again and again. While he takes undeniable pleasure in their “purely spiritual union,” he also can’t help but muse, while assisting her workers with the harvest, that tough physical labor “puts a brake on a rush of passion that, without such mechanical movements, teeters on the verge of destroying everything. I grasped the wisdom of routine tasks and the raison d’être of monastic rules.” But when his father calls him to Paris to join Louis’s court, his monkish commitment melts swiftly away in the swirl of bright parties and secret liaisons. Soon, he is embroiled in a scandalous affair with an English noblewoman, Lady Arabella Dudley, a dashing equestrienne and no-nonsense lover who “opens and shuts her heart with the facility of an English flush toilet” (there are many similar gibes at Balzac’s neighbors across the Channel, who deploy “a veneer of high-minded conviction […] to hide the rank stupidity of their prejudices”). Suddenly wallowing in the carnal pleasures he had so long been denied, Félix imagines himself “the plaything of […] two irreconcilable passions.” As he describes his situation, “I loved an angel and a demon; two equally beautiful women, one blessed with all the virtues we cast down because we hate our imperfections, the other blessed with all the vices we venerate out of selfishness.”

This rather schematic division between the two women dominates the novel’s second half, with each alternately jealous of and fascinated by her rival. A fleeting midnight encounter between the pair sends Henriette into a prolonged swoon that develops gradually into a wasting fever. Félix returns to the valley to find her dying. At last, Henriette seems to acknowledge her own smothered passion: “I long to see the waters of the Indre,” she tells him, “but I have a more burning thirst. I thirst for you.” She gives Félix a letter explaining her motives and behavior, which Balzac embeds in the text. This letter is a masterpiece of self-deception and willfully balked desire: Henriette confesses that their “amourous plight was cruelly shared” yet still expresses grim satisfaction that she may “have often stumbled, but […] never fell.” (The original version of this letter was even franker in acknowledging Henriette’s own foiled hunger, but Balzac emended it in subsequent editions at the urging of his friend Laure de Berny, upon whom he had modeled the character and with whom he enjoyed a similarly complex platonic bond.) As Brooks points out, this epistle is one of the few times Balzac allows a woman’s voice to reach us unfiltered by Félix’s self-interested narration. Yet the novel has one more such voice in store: at the very end, Natalie de Manerville, to whom Félix has addressed his long, sad story, rebukes him in another letter for his vanity and selfishness, for what Freud would have called his rationalizations. “No woman,” she frostily announces, “will ever want to enter your heart and rub shoulders with the dead woman you keep there.”

Despite feeling, at times, like a padded novella, Lily in the Valley is an engaging and affecting story. It joins NYRB’s recent edition of The Memoirs of Two Young Wives as an incisive study of the constrained realities of women’s lives during the early 19th century, with the author showing his characteristic deep empathy for their plight, along with an ironic perception of masculine arrogance and complacency. Memoirs, indeed, is one of the very rare Balzac texts in which women have not just the last word, as in Lily, but virtually every word. Balzac once claimed to be “half woman,” and you can certainly believe him as he offers lengthy—and surprisingly graphic—descriptions of childbirth and breastfeeding. There is also some sharp commentary on gender double standards when it comes to sexual morality, and the two main characters, young friends who escaped a convent to marry, can be quite withering in their assessments of the opposite sex, meanwhile extolling the special pleasures of female friendship. The two books pair together nicely, and it is clear that the editors at NYRB Classics have carefully pondered their selections from the vast Balzac archive. They have also chosen excellent translators, with Peter Bush offering a supple and eloquent rendition of the text. His decision to alter the novel’s title, usually given as The Lily of the Valley, to The Lily in the Valley highlights Henriette’s entrapment in the routines of rural domesticity: “you must imagine,” Félix writes, “the lily, which I have continually compared her to, entangled in the cogs of a machine […] whose dark bruises never heal.” Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

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Featured image: Henri Fantin-Latour. Roses and Lilies, 1888. The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection. Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 2001. Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2001.202.4). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed July 21, 2024.