Passion’s Countervoices

Near the start of Félix de Vandenesse’s frustrated passion for the married Henriette de Mortsauf in The Lily in the Valley, she asks him how he is so attuned to the trials she suffers as wife, mother, and subject of sensual temptation: “How can one so young know such things? Were you a woman once?” Félix’s answer only appears beside the point: “‘Oh,’ I answered, enthralled, ‘my childhood was one long illness.’” Being (like) a woman, it seems, resembles an illness; it’s inevitably marked by unhappiness. Félix’s early years were thoroughly deprived of all pleasure by a cold and punishing mother; he spent them penniless in severe boarding schools, which prepared him for the moment when, at a ball in the city of Tours to celebrate the return of the Bourbon monarchs after the abdication of Napoleon in 1814, he comes upon the décolletage of Madame de Mortsauf, whom he does not know, and throws himself at her, devouring her shoulders with kisses. She reacts with predictable outrage but, we discover much later, is fatally marked by this first explosion of passion in her life.

The whole of The Lily in the Valley vibrates with a kind of intense emotion emanating from Henriette’s inner life. But the novel is notable for how it presents her life and feelings through Félix’s blinded perceptions of them. If he is the instigator of wild inner experience for his beloved, he is not fully able to see or interpret it. The emotion bleeds through in all sorts of wildness in action and prose. Henriette is married to the Comte de Mortsauf, a former émigré who left France during the revolutionary upheavals and has returned to eke out a living at his Touraine estate. He is an irascible hypochondriac, and the two children he produces with Henriette are debilitated, presumably from syphilis. (He indulged in “low-life loves” during the emigration.) Henriette’s life is grim, and Félix’s adoration offers respite. But she is determined to remain a faithful wife and devoted mother. Passion will be entertained but not acted upon.

This gives the novel a tumultuous, unsettled background in urgent emotions that always threaten to spill out (the image is suggested by Félix) but must be dammed up. It’s preeminently the novel of passion denied but always threatening a return of the repressed. As Freud liked to quote from Horace, naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret: you can drive out nature with a forked stick (like a snake), but it will always return. In The Lily in the Valley, eros is always there, in a rhetoric that displays all the clichés of romantic passion yet at the same time lets us hear an ironic countervoice. The very structure of the novel, in fact, represents a kind of disciplining of its passionate content. Félix’s narrative of his all-consuming youthful love for Henriette is told in the form of a letter to his new love interest, Natalie de Manerville. She has asked him to explain his moodiness. His very first words—in Peter Bush’s new translation—are “I will bow to your wishes”: I will tell you why I am still dominated by the ghost of my past love. That tones down a bit the words “Je cède à ton désir”: I give in to your desire to possess my past life. And Félix ends this prefatory note to his confessional narrative with a plea: “don’t punish me” for giving in to your demand. We will see by the end how ineffectual a plea that is.

The novel is in this manner framed as a solicited confessional narrative, with all the dangers that may imply. And while it is all told by Félix, there are two other letters from Henriette herself that momentarily reverse perspective. The first of these is her epistle of instruction when Félix goes off to Paris to begin a political career at court—Louis XVIII is now on the throne—which is full of sound worldly advice, as well as warnings to stay away from young women and to cultivate women aged fifty, who are the true arbiters of society. The second letter, which Félix reads only after Henriette’s death, is something else entirely: it rewrites the novel we have read from the point of view of the object, not the subject, giving us Henriette’s narrative of what Félix’s passion has meant to her and how she was utterly marked by those original kisses at the ball in Tours:

Do you remember your kisses? They have dominated my life and furrowed my soul; the ardor in your blood aroused mine; your youth penetrated mine, your desires entered my heart. When I stood up so haughtily, I experienced a sensation for which I know no word in any language…. Yes, whenever I saw you after that, you revived their traces…. The sound of rebellious senses filled my ears…. If you had only taken me in your arms, I would have died of happiness.

So the virtuous, resisting heroine was really on the same erotic page as her would-be lover. But he did not, could not see it; and besides, her definition as virtuous wife and mother and white lily in the sensuous floral landscape of the Indre river valley does not provide any outlet for their passion—other maybe than conventional adultery, which the exalted state of her emotions refuses. Under the guidance of her confessor, Henriette decides she can safely treat Félix as a son and destine him to marriage with her daughter. What happens, inevitably, is that in Paris, Félix eventually falls to the wiles of a witty and very sexy Englishwoman, Arabella Dudley. And when Henriette finds out, told by her mother—families are dreadful vipers’ nests here—it creates a drama of mortal self-recognition: “Jealousy forged a gaping hole through which death came in.” She discovers, she confesses, that “I too was a daughter of that fallen race men love so much.” Just one more daughter of Eve.

Henriette’s posthumous confession doesn’t, of course, make Félix’s life any easier. Just before she dies—she refuses to eat for some forty days and kills herself through inanition—a final visit from Félix leads to a moment of erotic intoxication. She attempts a wild caress: “Yes, my friend, I do thirst. I long to see the waters of the Indre, but I have a more burning thirst. I thirst for you.” She wants “Paris, parties, and pleasures!” Her doctor has to drug her with opium so she can make a suitably pious end. As for Félix, the demonstration of a reciprocated passion too late to be acted upon leaves him more or less castrated, attempting to detach himself from the

strength that gave me life, a torture similar to the one the Tartars used to inflict on an adulterer by trapping a guilty man’s member within a piece of wood and giving him a knife with which to sever it.

By the time of her death, Henriette seems able to unsilence the voice of long-suffering desire. It’s a powerful antidote to the gooey language of platonic romantic passion, which seems to invest situations of erotic impasse with rhetorical excess. But the unrestrained voice of desire speaks too late: it speaks only in the context of the impossible. The novel as a whole is not a story of liberation but of compromise formation—achieving a painful and eventually destructive equilibrium between the demands and the refusal of eros. It manages to keep us at a certain level of paroxysmic emotion while never endorsing it.

The Lily in the Valley is in fact remarkable in simultaneously giving full-throated voice to romantic passion and containing it, inflating its rhetoric while ironizing it. The fate of passion for much of the novel is like the games of backgammon Félix is forced to play with the Comte de Mortsauf. Félix doesn’t know the game; he makes errors and the count wins their stakes, leaving Félix’s small purse emptied. He finds a learned book on the game, studies it, and begins to win. But his winning drives the count into fits of rage in which he overthrows the game board and smashes pieces of furniture. Hence Félix must learn to allow the count to win early in the evening, then catch up by the final round to make things come out even. That’s the situation of eros in the novel: it reaches an unhappy equilibrium, with concessions made—when Félix is allowed to kiss Henriette’s hand, for instance—but always compensated for.

There is another kind of compensation at work in the bouquets Félix constructs from the flowers he gathers in gardens and fields. He refers us at one point to the Turkish language of love expressed in floral arrangements. But his bouquets don’t seem to refer to any conventional codes of meaning. They are rather cries of passion repressed and obliged to speak in this other compromise formation:

Tendrils of the grapevines; twisting, entangling honeysuckle; in a word, everything these simple creatures possess that is most tousled and unruly, flames and triple darts; jagged, spear-shaped leaves; stalks as tortuous as the desires writhing in the depths of your soul. Out of that exuberant, overflowing torrent of love rises a magnificent double red poppy, its bud ready to open and spread the sparks from its flames above starry jasmine, soaring above a nonstop drizzle of pollen, a beautiful cloud hovering in the air, a thousand glinting shards reflecting the light of day! What woman, inebriated by Aphrodite’s scent hiding in the vernal grass, could fail to understand that treasure trove of suppressed feeling, that amorous pallor disturbed by untamed movements, the red desire of love pleading for the happiness denied to the eternal, conflicted passion that is reborn hundredfold.

Félix calls the bouquets “oblique delights” that help to “delude natures frustrated by long contemplation of the beloved.” It’s a language of slaves designed to trick the master—not, I think, so much Henriette’s husband as eros itself. More compromise, in the very language of desire.

The contemporary critic C.A. Sainte-Beuve accused Balzac of a kind of unhealthy success with his female readership. He slipped into their intimacy as

a consoler, a confessor…. He knows many things about women, their emotional and sensual feelings; he asks them bold, intimate questions…. He has seized the right to speak suggestively about those mysterious private details which hold a confused charm for the most modest.

Sainte-Beuve never could appreciate Balzac, whose success flummoxed him. But he is right that women (a crucial readership of the novel from its inception as a genre) responded to Balzac’s female characters in A Woman of Thirty and The Deserted Woman and many another tale in which he seemed able to enter and dramatize women’s condition. As Balzac wrote in a letter to Evelina Hanska—the Polish noblewoman who became a correspondent and lover and much later his wife—the social “duel” between men and women is frighteningly unequal. And he had the capacity to try, at least, to understand that duel from other than the man’s perspective. “Were you a woman once?” Henriette asks Félix. Balzac seems to have felt at least a measure of androgyny, which, for instance, allowed him to give a sympathetic picture of same-sex love, especially in the relationships of the most powerful figure of The Human Comedy, Jacques Collin, aka Vautrin, aka Cheat-Death, with the young men who become his protégés and in the lesbian lovers of The Girl with the Golden Eyes, which led Proust to comment: “Here under the apparent and exterior action of the drama circulate the mysterious laws of love and passion.”

That essay of Sainte-Beuve’s on Balzac dates from 1834, before the publication of The Lily in the Valley two years later. Also in 1834 Sainte-Beuve published his one novel, Volupté, about a troubled young man whose love for an older married woman eventually leads him to religious conversion and the priesthood. Balzac found it too puritanical, lacking in real erotic temptation. And after reading the critic’s snide essay as well as his novel, Balzac (according to a not very reliable witness, but one accredited by Sainte-Beuve himself) announced that he would run Sainte-Beuve through with his pen. He would redo Volupté and get the story right this time.

So The Lily in the Valley stands as a conscious attempt to reconsider romantic passion in what was at the time a conventional presentation—inexperienced young man with married older woman—in its full dimensions. There is plenty of deference given to romance, to chastity, to the dignity of a woman who must manage husband, children, estate and farm and their employees, who has been married to someone her parents considered suitable and forgone passion until the chance encounter of her shoulders with Félix’s impassioned lips. And she must then find workable compromise formations to keep her would-be lover under control. It’s again like the games of backgammon, an unremitting, exhausting attempt to keep everything in emotional equilibrium. The count cries out in one of his temper tantrums that she is a “virgin at my expense.” Henriette will whisper to Félix, “If only you knew…!” She avoids sex with the count because she has seen the debilitating effects of syphilis on their progeny, but she implies as well that his attempts at sex are unsuccessful. The entire erotic economy is a mess, and fitting Félix’s demands into it appears impossible. Henriette is no Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.

Yet as her testamentary letter shows, she is by no means indifferent to Félix’s claims. He offers entry into a territory she never knew existed, and resisting going there demands enormous effort. At one point, when she and Félix have nursed the count back to health after a dangerous illness—a caregiving enterprise that has brought them closer than ever—and Félix whines that he would “surrender eternity for a single day of happiness, and you!” she replies, “Me!…which me do you refer to? I feel there are lots of different mes in me!” She cannot be the heroine of romance in any simple sense: there are too many different exigencies defining her. She ends this conversation by saying, “My God…why are we talking about such things? Marry, and let me die!” Her conflicted emotions result in a passive-aggressive command to Félix. He too is in a double bind, and when he does finally take up with Arabella Dudley, Henriette will indeed be done to death.

And at that point Félix has to assume all the guilt she passes on to him. He generalizes, evoking other women in the novels of The Human Comedy killed by the hateful acts of men:

Society and science are complicit in these crimes for which there are no courts of law…. The new nomenclature finds clever words to explain everything: gastritis, pericarditis, a thousand female maladies, their labels whispered in the ear, passports to coffins attended by hypocritical tears the hand of a notary soon wipes away.

But the question finally returns to him: “My God, do I belong to a race of tigers?”

Félix is not necessarily more tigerish than other young men. The story might have come out more happily if he had been, if it had reached a quicker dénouement one way or another rather than spinning out its compromises for so long. But the race of tigers is real and is clearly identified as male, so that “duel” between men and women Balzac mentioned in his letter to Madame Hanska always contains a dangerous animal to be dealt with somehow. The Lily in the Valley both unleashes and ironizes romantic passion, but it offers no way out.

In the case of Félix, though, it does offer one kind of explicit answer. His entire narrative has been couched as a letter to his new love, Natalie de Manerville. After telling her of Henriette’s death (and including the text of her testamentary letter) and his subsequent break with Arabella and decision to devote himself wholly to his career as a royal diplomat, by which he has achieved a serenity that only his new love has interrupted, he concludes that he fears he may have “ruffled folds in your delicate, jealous heart” but believes his full confession will give her fresh reasons to love him: “Tomorrow, I will know whether I erred in loving you.”

Natalie’s reply is suitably clearsighted and brutal. “Allow me to complete your education,” she says: stop talking about your past women. No one wants to rub shoulders with the dead woman you keep in your heart. “Do you know the woman I pity? The fourth woman you love. Of necessity, she will be forced to fight the three others.” Yes, I asked about your past, but in response, “you should have deceived me; I would have thanked you later.” In fact, in the future, if you want to enjoy the company of women, “take care to hide everything you told me…. All women would see the parched nature of your heart and you would always be unhappy.” And she signs off as his “devoted friend.”

The novel in this manner provides its own first reading of Félix’s narrative—a reading that results in a harsh judgment of his self-indulgence and plea for understanding. Natalie’s critique of Félix’s tale is a triumph of Balzac’s bracing cynicism. He wanted to skewer Sainte-Beuve’s mystic maunderings, and he does so most effectively in Natalie’s seeming rejection of the entire confessional-amorous mode of storytelling. When you have such “crimes” on your conscience, she tells him, at least keep them to yourself. Stop talking.

Good advice to Félix, no doubt, but not the final word to be said about the novel, which is great in large measure because it contains both talk and countertalk, lots of amorous rhetoric, but silence too—silence in which interpretation of what is meant by the other must take place. The Lily in the Valley is a stunning demonstration of what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin called a “dialogic” novel: one that does not conclude, that argues unendingly with itself. Bakhtin’s chief example was always Dostoevsky, who of course was a great reader and admirer of Balzac’s novels. The dramatic impasse of passion and its containment—it at times reads as the irresolvable conflict of eros and the death drive—animates The Lily in the Valley, sustains it as a challenging experience of reading. It is good to have it back, freshly translated. It has not grown old.