Repertory of The Comedie Humaine, Part 1 — Edition Insights

Balzac was not content merely to display the fruitful sources of a modern intellect, but that he cast upon them the glare of the most ardent imagination the world has ever known. By a rare combination this philosopher was also a man, like the story-tellers of the Orient, to whom solitude and the over-excitement of night-work had communicated a brilliant and unbroken hallucination. He was able to impart this fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of /Arabian Nights/ country, where all the passions, all the desires of real life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the dreams brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of Balzac's is more real than the actual world, and that they devoted their energies to imitating it?

It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive influences. It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central portions of the nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread the /Comedie Humaine/. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe for this /Repertory/. Thanks to them, we shall the more easily traverse the long galleries, painted and frescoed, of this enormous palace,--a palace still unfinished, inasmuch as it lacks those Scenes of Military Life whose titles awaken dreams within us: /Forced Marches/; /The Battle of Austerlitz/; /After Dresden/. Incontestably, Tolstoy's /War and Peace/ is an admirable book, but how can we help regretting the loss of the painting of the Grand Army and of our Great Emperor, by Balzac, our Napoleon of letters?

REPERTORY OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE

ABRAMKO, Polish Jew of gigantic strength, thoroughly devoted to the broker, Elie Magus, whose porter he was, and whose daughter and treasures he guarded with the aid of three fierce dogs, in 1844, in a old house on the Minimes road hard by the Palais Royale, Paris. Abramko had allowed himself to be compromised in the Polish insurrection and Magus was interested in saving him. [Cousin Pons.]

ADELE, sturdy, good-hearted Briarde servant of Denis Rogron and his sister, Sylvie, from 1824 to 1827 at Provins. Contrary to her employers, she displayed much sympathy and pity for their youthful cousin, Pierrette Lorrain. [Pierrette.]

ADELE, chambermaid of Madame du Val-Noble at the time when the latter was maintained so magnificently by the stockbroker, Jacques Falleix, who failed in 1929. [Scenes from a Courtesan's Life.]

ADOLPHE, slight, blonde young man employed at the shop of the shawl merchant, Fritot, in the Bourse quarter, Paris, at the time of the reign of Louis Philippe. [Gaudissart II.]

ADOLPHUS, head of the banking firm of Adolphus & Company of Manheim, and father of the Baroness Wilhelmine d'Aldrigger. [The Firm of Nucingen.]

AGATHE (Sister), nee Langeais, nun of the convent of Chelles, and, with her sister Martha and the Abbe de Marolles, a refugee under the Terror in a poor house of the Faubourg Saint-Martin, Paris. [An Episode Under the Terror.]