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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Country Doctor, by Honore de Balzac
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Title: The Country Doctor
Author: Honore de Balzac
Release Date: July 6, 2004 [EBook #1350]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COUNTRY DOCTOR ***
Produced by Dagny
THE COUNTRY DOCTOR
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by
Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
"For a wounded heart--shadow and silence."
To my Mother
INTRODUCTION
In hardly any of his books, with the possible exception of /Eugenie
Grandet/, does Balzac seem to have taken a greater interest than in
/Le Medecin de Campagne/; and the fact of this interest, together with
the merit and intensity of the book in each case, is, let it be
repeated, a valid argument against those who would have it that there
was something essentially sinister both in his genius and his
character.
/Le Medecin de Campagne/ was an early book; it was published in 1833,
a date of which there is an interesting mark in the selection of the
name "Evelina," the name of Madame Hanska, whom Balzac had just met,
for the lost Jansenist love of Benassis; and it had been on the stocks
for a considerable time. It is also noteworthy, as lying almost
entirely outside the general scheme of the /Comedie Humaine/ as far as
personages go. Its chief characters in the remarkable, if not
absolutely impeccable, /repertoire/ of MM. Cerfberr and Christophe
(they have, a rare thing with them, missed Agathe the forsaken
mistress) have no references appended to their articles, except to the
book itself; and I cannot remember that any of the more generally
pervading /dramatis personae/ of the Comedy makes even an incidental
appearance here. The book is as isolated as its scene and subject--I
might have added, as its own beauty, which is singular and unique, nor
wholly easy to give a critical account of. The transformation of the
/cretin/-haunted desert into a happy valley is in itself a commonplace
of the preceding century; it may be found several times over in
Marmontel's /Contes Moraux/, as well as in other places. The extreme
minuteness of detail, effective as it is in the picture of the house
and elsewhere, becomes a little tedious even for well-tried and
well-affected readers, in reference to the exact number of cartwrights
and harness-makers, and so forth; while the modern reader pure and
simple, though schooled to endure detail, is schooled to endure it
only of the ugly. The minor characters and episodes, with the
exception of the wonderful story or legend of Napoleon by Private
Goguelat, and the private himself, are neither of the first interest,
nor always carefully worked out: La Fosseuse, for instance, is a very
tantalizingly unfinished study, of which it is nearly certain that
Balzac must at some time or other have meant to make much more than he
has made; Genestas, excellent as far as he goes, is not much more than
a type; and there is nobody else in the foreground at all except the
Doctor himself.
It is, however, beyond all doubt in the very subordination of these
other characters to Benassis, and in the skilful grouping of the whole
as background and adjunct to him, that the appeal of the book as art
consists. From that point of view there are grounds for regarding it
as the finest of the author's work in the simple style, the least
indebted to super-added ornament or to mere variety. The dangerous
expedient of a /recit/, of which the eighteenth-century novelists were
so fond, has never been employed with more successful effect than in
the confession of Benassis, at once the climax and the centre of the
story. And one thing which strikes us immediately about this
confession is the universality of its humanity and its strange freedom
from merely national limitations. To very few French novelists--to few
even of those who are generally credited with a much softer mould and
a much purer morality than Balzac is popularly supposed to have been
able to boast--would inconstancy to a mistress have seemed a fault
which could be reasonably punished, which could be even reasonably
represented as having been punished in fact, by the refusal of an
honest girl's love in the first place. Nor would many have conceived
as possible, or have been able to represent in lifelike colors, the
lifelong penance which Benassis imposes on himself. The tragic end,
indeed, is more in their general way, but they would seldom have known
how to lead up to it.
In almost all ways Balzac has saved himself from the dangers incident
to his plan in this book after a rather miraculous fashion. The
Goguelat myth may seem disconnected, and he did as a matter of fact
once publish it separately; yet it sets off (in the same sort of
felicitous manner of which Shakespeare's clown-scenes and others are
the capital examples in literature) both the slightly matter-of-fact
details of the beatification of the valley and the various minute
sketches of places and folk, and the almost superhuman goodness of
Benassis, and his intensely and piteously human suffering and remorse.
It is like the red cloak in a group; it lights, warms, inspirits the
whole picture.
And perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is the way in which
Balzac in this story, so full of goodness of feeling, of true religion
(for if Benassis is not an ostensible practiser of religious rites, he
avows his orthodoxy in theory, and more than justifies it in
practice), has almost entirely escaped the sentimentality /plus/
unorthodoxy of similar work in the eighteenth century, and the
sentimentality /plus/ orthodoxy of similar work in the nineteenth.
Benassis no doubt plays Providence in a manner and with a success
which it is rarely given to mortal man to achieve; but we do not feel
either the approach to sham, or the more than approach to gush, with
which similar handling on the part of Dickens too often affects some
of us. The sin and the punishment of the Doctor, the thoroughly human
figures of Genestas and the rest, save the situation from this and
other drawbacks. We are not in the Cockaigne of perfectibility, where
Marmontel and Godwin disport themselves; we are in a very practical
place, where time-bargains in barley are made, and you pay the
respectable, if not lavish board of ten francs per day for
entertainment to man and beast.
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