Abstract
This chapter examines the work of Charles Rabou, who was commissioned by Mme Balzac to complete her husband’s unfinished novel Le Député d’Arcis and produced a long continuation which was presented as a novel written by Balzac and only completed by Rabou according to Balzac’s notes. I read Rabou’s sequel, which was for a long time attributed to Balzac, as a self-conscious forgery which does not only attempt to pass itself off as a work by Balzac by resurrecting a host of characters from La Comédie humaine but also thematises the conditions of its own production by making its plot revolve around the notions of unauthorised copying and false attribution of paternity.
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Notes
- 1.
Balzac signed as Lord R’Hoone and his collaborator, Auguste Lepoitevin de l’Égreville, as A. de Viellerglé: see the first volume of Honoré de Balzac, Premiers Romans, ed. André Lorant, 2 vols (Paris: Laffont, 1999).
- 2.
See, e.g., Léon Gozlan, Balzac intime (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1886), 30–36.
- 3.
BC, 1:668–69 (letter 412, around 10 February 1832).
- 4.
Le Député d’Arcis has many parallels to Ce que regrettent les femmes (1834), a novel written by another of Balzac’s ‘collaborators’, Félix Davin : see Maurice Bardèche, ‘Notice sur Le Député d’Arcis,’ CHH, 14:410–411; Colin Smethurst, preface to Le Député d’Arcis, in CH, 8:699–702. On Les Petits Bourgeois, see Anne-Marie Meininger, ‘Les Petits Bourgeois: Genèse et abandon,’ AB 1969, 211–30.
- 5.
Collection Lovenjoul A 272, fo 228, cited in Bardèche, ‘Notice,’ CHH, 14:407n1.
- 6.
Lovenjoul A 389 bis, fo 75, cited in Christiane Thil, ‘Le Député d’Arcis: Histoire de l’achèvement et de la publication du roman de Balzac par Charles Rabou,’ AB 1983, 146n7. On Rabou’s recruitment and Champfleury’s involvement, see Mme Honoré de Balzac (Éveline Hanska), Lettres inédites à Champfleury (1851–1854), ed. Lorin A. Uffenbeck and Elizabeth Fudakowska (Paris: Champion; Geneva: Slatkine, 1989), 32n8; Graham Robb, Balzac (London: Picador, 1994), 413–14. On Mme Balzac’s involvement with Champfleury, see Roger Pierrot, Ève de Balzac (Paris: Stock, 1998), 358–64.
- 7.
Lovenjoul A 272, fo 21, cited in Thil, ‘Le Député,’ 147.
- 8.
On Rabou’s turbulent relations with Mme Balzac, see Thil, ‘Le Député,’ 145–60.
- 9.
Julien Lemer, Balzac: Sa vie. Son œuvre (Paris: L. Sauvaitre, 1892), 294.
- 10.
For a detailed history of the completion of the novel by Rabou, see Thil, ‘Le Député,’ 145–60.
- 11.
The quotation in the title of this section is taken from FB, 27. ‘Résurrection’ was also the title of the second chapter of La Transaction in the original publication.
- 12.
There is no recent or scholarly edition of Rabou’s continuation of Le Député d’Arcis: for reasons of easy consultation, I have chosen to use the editions that have been digitised and are easily accessible, after verifying that the text of the feuilleton and of the first publication in volume form is reproduced in its entirety. Reference will therefore be made to the following editions: Le Député d’Arcis (Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1859); Le Comte de Sallenauve, 5 vols (Paris: de Potter, 1854); La Famille Beauvisage (Paris: Albert Méricant, 1900).
- 13.
Despite the lack of evidence, Bardèche believes that the introduction of these characters is an ‘initiative si étrange qu’elle ne peut guère s’expliquer que par une “recommandation” de Balzac’ [such a strange initiative that it can only be explained by a ‘recommendation’ by Balzac]: see Maurice Bardèche, ‘Notice,’ CHH, 14:407.
- 14.
Letter to Dutacq, Lovenjoul A 274, fo 116–17, cited in Thil, ‘Le Député,’ 153.
- 15.
See Le Constitutionnel, 24 August–1 September, 3, 5, 8, 10 September, 21–24, 28 November 1852.
- 16.
Le Constitutionnel, 15–18, 21–22 September 1853.
- 17.
See, e.g., Le Constitutionnel, 25 November 1853.
- 18.
For details, see Bardèche, ‘Notice,’ CHH, 14:408–10; Colin Smethurst, in CH, 8:1594; Thil, ‘Le Député,’ 159.
- 19.
Michael Lucey, The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 287n12.
- 20.
Charles de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Histoire des œuvres de H. de Balzac (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1879), 155–56.
- 21.
Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Christophe, Répertoire des personnages de la “Comédie humaine” (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1888).
- 22.
Joachim Merlant, Morceaux choisis de H. de Balzac (Paris: Didier, 1912), 491.
- 23.
Fernand Roux, Balzac jurisconsulte et criminaliste (Paris: Dujarric et Cie, 1906), 289.
- 24.
See Armand Dutacq, ‘À Monsieur le Rédacteur en chef du Mousquetaire,’ Le Mousquetaire, 7 December 1853 and Armand Baschet, ‘Réponse à M. Alexandre Dumas sur la question Dutacq,’ Le Mousquetaire, 8 December 1853.
- 25.
This seems to have been Balzac’s plan, according to his preface to Pierrette: ‘L’un de nos plus terribles célibataires, Maxime de Trailles, se marie. […] le premier ministre donne une place à de Trailles qui devient d’ailleurs un excellent député’ [One of our most formidable bachelors, Maxime de Trailles, is getting married. […] The prime minister gives a seat to de Trailles who, moreover, becomes an excellent representative]. See CH, 4:22–23.
- 26.
See Thil, ‘Le Député,’ 160.
- 27.
Maurice Barrière, L’Œuvre de H. de Balzac (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1890), 288.
- 28.
On Le Député d’Arcis, see Colin Smethurst, ‘Introduction à l’étude du Député d’Arcis,’ AB 1967, 223–40; Colin Smethurst and A. R. Pugh, ‘“L’Ambitieux malgré lui” et Le Député d’Arcis,’ AB 1969, 231–45.
- 29.
Forty-three according to Ethel Preston, Recherches sur la technique de Balzac: Le Retour systématique des personnages dans la “Comédie humaine” (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984); fifty according to Fernand Lotte, ‘Le “Retour des personnages” dans La Comédie humaine: Avantages et inconvénients du procédé,’ AB 1960, 227–81; sixty according to A. R. Pugh, Balzac’s Recurring Characters (London: Duckworth, 1975).
- 30.
The novel with the highest count is Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes: a hundred and fifty-five according to Preston, a hundred and sixty-six according to Lotte, and a hundred and seventy-five according to Pugh.
- 31.
Letter to Dutacq, 30 June 1852, Lovenjoul A 274, fo 103, cited in Thil, ‘Le Député,’ 149.
- 32.
Honoré de Balzac, Lettres à Madame Hanska, ed. Roger Pierrot, 4 vols (Paris: Éditions du Delta, 1967–71), 1:295–96 (17 January 1835).
- 33.
Adrien Gastambide, Traité théorique et pratique des contrefaçons en tous genres (Paris: Legrand et Descauriet, 1837), 97.
- 34.
DA, 135, 136, 170, 261, 262; CS, 3:4; FB, 55.
- 35.
On the theme of paternity as a kind of metatextual comment on literary collaboration cf. Seth Whidden’s reading of Le Supplice d’une femme by Émile de Girardin and Alexandre Dumas fils in Authority in Crisis in French Literature, 1850–1880 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 21–35.
- 36.
Charles Nodier, Questions de littérature légale, ed. Jean-François Jeandillou (Geneva: Droz, 2003), 56, 72. For a definition of ‘la supposition d’auteur’, see the post-face to Jean-François Jeandillou, Supercheries littéraires: La Vie et l’œuvre des auteurs supposés (Paris: Usher, 1989), 468.
- 37.
Augustin-Charles Renouard, Traité des droits d’auteurs, dans la littérature, les sciences et les beaux-arts, 2 vols (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1838–39), 2:232.
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Paraschas, S. (2018). The Poetics of Forgery in Charles Rabou’s Continuation of Balzac’s Le Député d’Arcis . In: Reappearing Characters in Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69290-6_4
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