The Wrong Side of Paris (Modern Library Classics) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), the great French novelist, was the author of The Human Comedy, a vast and delightful series of inter-connected novels that presents a comprehensive portrait of all walks of French society.

Jordan Stump, winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, is the translator of more than six French novels, including the Modern Library edition of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, described as “breezy” and “blissfully readable” by Kirkus Reviews.

Adam Gopnik is the author of the national bestseller Paris to the Moon. He writes often on various subjects for The New Yorker.

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"The Wrong Side of Paris, the final novel in Balzac's "The Human Comedy, is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame. Presided over by Madame de La Chanterie, a noblewoman with a tragic past, the house is inhabited by a remarkable band of men--all scarred by the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution--who have devoted their lives to performing anonymous acts of charity. Intrigued by the Order of the Brotherhood of Consolation and their uplifting dedication to virtuous living, Godefroid strives to follow their example. He agrees to travel--incognito--to a Parisian slum to save a noble family from ruin. There he meets a beautiful, ailing Polish woman who lives in great luxury, unaware that just outside her bedroom door her own father and son are suffering in dire poverty. By proving himself worthy of the Brotherhood, Godefroid finds his own spiritual redemption.
This vivid portrait of the underbelly of nineteenth-century Paris, exuberantly rendered by Jordan Stump, is the first major translation in more than a century of Balzac's forgotten masterpiece" L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine. Featuring an illuminating Introduction by Adam Gopnik, this original Modern Library edition also includes explanatory notes.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Aus dem Klappentext

The Wrong Side of Paris, the final novel in Balzacs The Human Comedy, is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame. Presided over by Madame de La Chanterie, a noblewoman with a tragic past, the house is inhabited by a remarkable band of menall scarred by the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolutionwho have devoted their lives to performing anonymous acts of charity. Intrigued by the Order of the Brotherhood of Consolation and their uplifting dedication to virtuous living, Godefroid strives to follow their example. He agrees to travelincognitoto a Parisian slum to save a noble family from ruin. There he meets a beautiful, ailing Polish woman who lives in great luxury, unaware that just outside her bedroom door her own father and son are suffering in dire poverty. By proving himself worthy of the Brotherhood, Godefroid finds his own spiritual redemption.
This vivid portrait of the underbelly of nineteenth-century Paris, exuberantly rendered by Jordan Stump, is the first major translation in more than a century of Balzacs forgotten masterpiece LEnvers de lhistoire contemporaine. Featuring an illuminating Introduction by Adam Gopnik, this original Modern Library edition also includes explanatory notes.


From the Hardcover edition.

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FIRST EPISODE

Madame de La Chanterie

One fine September evening in the year 1836, a man of about thirty stood hunched over the parapet of a quay by the Seine. Facing upstream, he could survey the riverbanks from the Jardin des Plantes to Notre-Dame; downstream, his gaze followed the water’s majestic course all the way to the Louvre. There is not another such prospect in all the Capital of Ideas. Standing here on the Île de la Cité, one imagines oneself in the stern of some sea vessel grown to colossal proportions. The view summons up dreams of Paris, the Paris of the Romans and the Franks, of the Normans and the Burgundians; the Paris of the Middle Ages, the Valois, Henri IV and Louis XIV, Napoleon and Louis-Philippe. Each of these regimes has left some mark or monument hereabouts, insistently recalling its creators to the observer’s mind. Sainte Geneviève watches over the Latin Quarter, spread out beneath her dome. Behind you rises the magnificent apse of the cathedral. The Hôtel de Ville speaks to you of Paris’s many upheavals, the Hôtel-Dieu of her many miseries. From here you can glimpse the splendors of the Louvre; now take two steps and you will have before you that wretched huddle of houses between the Quai de la Tournelle and the Hôtel-Dieu, toward whose disappearance the city fathers are working even now.

Another edifying sight graced that wondrous tableau in those days: between the cathedral and the Parisian at his parapet, the Terrain, for such was the name of that deserted plot of land in times past, was still strewn with the ruins of the archbishop’s palace. Standing where the Parisian now stood, contemplating this inspiring prospect, with Paris’s past and present laid out together before your admiring gaze, you might think that Religion had chosen to settle on this island in order to reach out toward the sorrows of both banks of the Seine, from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. We can only hope that a setting so sublimely harmonious will one day be made complete by the construction of an episcopal palace in pure Gothic style, replacing the drab hovels now enclosed by the Terrain, the Rue d’Arcole, the cathedral, and the Quai de la Cité.

This, the very heart of old Paris, is the city’s loneliest and most melancholy spot. The waters of the Seine clap against the quay, shrouded in the long shadows of the cathedral as the sun sinks in the west. Such a setting gives rise to serious thoughts, particularly for one in the grips of a spiritual affliction. No doubt fascinated by the sympathetic harmony of his private preoccupations and the thoughts awakened by this panorama, the stroller stood with his hands on the parapet, lost in a twofold contemplation: of Paris, and of himself! The shadows grew longer, lights flickered to life in the distance, and still he stood motionless, caught up in a meditation pregnant with thoughts of the future, made solemn by the presence of the past.

It was then that he noted two figures approaching, their voices wafting to his ear from the stone bridge that links the Île de la Cité to the Quai de la Tournelle. No doubt they thought themselves quite alone, for they would never have spoken so loudly in a more frequented spot, nor if they were aware of a stranger standing close by. The voices from the bridge betokened a discussion which—from the few words reaching the ear of the involuntary witness—clearly involved a loan of money. As they drew nearer, one of the two men, dressed in the fashion of a worker, abruptly stalked off as if in despair. The other whirled around, calling the worker back to him, and said, “You haven’t even a sou to pay the bridge toll.” Handing him a coin, he added, “Take this, and remember, my friend, that it is God Himself who is speaking to us when virtuous thoughts come into our minds!”

The meditative Parisian gave a sudden start on hearing these last few words. Their speaker could not have known that his maxim had, as they say, killed two birds with one stone, that he had thereby addressed two separate miseries at once: on the one hand the despair of a defeated schemer, on the other the sufferings of a soul adrift; one a victim of what Panurge’s sheep call Progress, the other of what France calls Equality. These words, so simple in themselves, were made great by the speaker’s intonation, for his voice possessed a sort of mesmerizing charm. Are there not certain voices, calm and gentle, that strike the ear much as the color ultramarine the eye?

A glance at this stranger told the Parisian he was a man of the cloth; in the last glimmers of the setting sun he made out a pale face, noble but careworn. The mere sight of a priest emerging from the beautiful Saint Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, on his way to give extreme unction to a dying man, was enough to bring the celebrated tragic author Werner to Catholicism. The Parisian was not far from a similar transformation as he gazed at the one who had unknowingly offered him solace; against the threatening horizon of his future, he glimpsed a long ray of light shot through with the blue of the ether, and he followed that gleam just as the shepherds in the Scriptures pursued the voice crying to them from on high: “The Savior is born!” The speaker of the healing words was now walking along the cathedral’s northern flank, heading—purely by chance, which is sometimes no inconsequential thing—toward the very street that had brought the wandering Parisian to this place, a street to which he would now return, lured ever onward by the many missteps of his life.

This wanderer went by the name of Godefroid. The reader of our story will soon understand why its actors must be referred to by their Christian names alone. Now, here is why Godefroid, who lived near the Chaussée d’Antin, happened to find himself by the apse of Notre-Dame at this hour.

The son of a shopkeeper whose frugality had earned him a sort of fortune, he was the sole vessel for his parents’ ambition, which was to see him one day made a notaire in Paris. Thus, at the age of seven, he was placed into Father Liautard’s academy, along with the scions of many distinguished families, who chose to educate their sons in this establishment out of devotion to a religion too widely ignored in the public schools of the Emperor’s reign. Among his school friends he remained blissfully unaware of the notion of social inequality; but in 1821, his studies at an end, Godefroid was placed in a notaire’s office, and here he realized how great was the gulf between himself and those with whom he had once lived so familiarly.

Forced into the study of law, he found himself submerged in a vast herd of bourgeois youth, who, with neither fortune nor hereditary distinction to their names, have no choice but to place their faith solely in personal merit or tireless work. His father and mother, now retired from business, conferred all their aspirations on Godefroid, encouraging his self-confidence but preserving him from vanity. His parents lived simply, like Dutch folk, spending only a quarter of their twelve-thousand-franc yearly revenue; the money thus saved, along with half of their capital, would be used to purchase a situation for their son. Oppressed by the laws of this domestic economy, and finding his present circumstances so distant from his parents’ dreams and his own, Godefroid lost heart. Among those of weak temperament, disheartenment soon gives way to envy. His fellows, for whom need, tenacity, or diligence took the place of natural talent, marched resolutely ahead down the path of bourgeois ambition; but Godefroid rebelled, yearned to stand out, to shine. Wherever things were bright and...