How To Tell If You’re In an Honoré de Balzac Novel -The Toast

Previously in this series: How To Tell If You’re In a Lesbian Pulp Novel.

You’re a young man from the provinces and you’ve just arrived in Paris to make your fortune. You have big dreams, but no skills to speak of.

Your boyish charm and feminine hips have attracted the attention of a wealthy woman and/or a sinister homosexual criminal who will someday become the chief of police.

Your face is so complicated that it takes three pages to describe.

There’s a woman you’d like to sleep with, so you decide to tell her an off-putting story about murder, castration, or bestiality.

You’re a woman of about thirty years of age who is still beautiful, which is obvious to everyone because you have such shapely oval fingernails.

You’re best friends with another woman of about thirty years of age, one who is slightly less beautiful than you. Your friendship is built on an unshakeable foundation of smiling sweetly, strolling through gardens together, and plotting to destroy one another.

Your house is so complicated that it takes thirty pages to describe.

You frequently attend the opera to gossip about other patrons. You have never actually seen an opera.

You play a lot of whist.

You’re a misunderstood artistic genius with a vision so brilliant and impossible to realize that you’re doomed to both artistic failure and early death. You make sure to fit in a few good monologues about the nature of your craft before you end up destitute and/or dead.

You heard this story from a friend of a friend whose nephew saw it happen while he was in the military.

You live in Paris, that stage with its endless rotation of new actors in old roles. Paris, that monstrous place where everything is possible, good as well as evil. Paris, that realm that welcomes all fortunes, no matter how bloody or shameful. Paris, that illustrious vale of plaster forever on the point of collapse and gutters full of mud. Paris, that oozing pustule on the ass of a rotting fish.

There is scandalous gossip about you. All of it is true.

You regularly attend dinner parties where each guest tells one carefully crafted and eerily perfect short story.

You’re a shriveled up old maid and you are evil.

You dare not recount the end of this tale, for it is horribly bourgeois.

Gentlemen are always falling prey to the irresistible way in which you arrange your skirts.

You’re surrounded by a vast and complex Society populated with a variety of human archetypes, as different from each other as wolves are from lions or donkeys or crows. People act in accordance with their own interests; society, in the immensity of its agitations, produces as much suffering as it does triumph. Also, there are a hell of a lot of recurring characters and family lineages to keep track of.

You once tried to have sex with a panther.

Once, as a young man from the provinces freshly arrived in Paris, you had some illusions about the world, but now they are lost.

Rachel Tapley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches and translates French. Some day she’ll finish her dissertation.

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+11 Vote up Vote down

wallofillusion 127p · 553 weeks ago

It seems that at least half of the citizens of Fallen London are in Balzac novels. Except for the Paris bit, I suppose.
(I realize that the Paris bit is a comparatively large bit.)

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thelyesmith 107p · 553 weeks ago

"You’re best friends with another woman of about thirty years of age, one who is slightly less beautiful than you. Your friendship is built on an unshakeable foundation of smiling sweetly, strolling through gardens together, and plotting to destroy one another."

This is all I've ever wanted in a best friend.

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GreenGrasses 121p · 553 weeks ago

Gentlemen are always falling prey to the irresistible way in which you arrange your skirts.

I believe that this is true for myself, and I am glad.

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EPWordsnatcher 126p · 553 weeks ago

Did someone in a Balzac novel actually try to have sex with a panther and that's not just a sneaky Anchorman reference in there?

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4 replies · active 553 weeks ago

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rachelsilvertapley 108p · 553 weeks ago

Technically it happened in a short story. It's called "Une Passion dans le désert" and there is an English translation here if you want to feel really weird forever: http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/pitdbalz.htm...

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turanga_leela 121p · 553 weeks ago

Also, there is a movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0125980/?ref_=nm_knf_...

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rachelsilvertapley 108p · 553 weeks ago

OH MAN I forgot about the movie but YEAH it is maybe even weirder than the original text. It's been years since I watched it, but I can still see that dude rolling around in the mud in an effort to seduce a panther. We should all be so lucky as to find something in this world that makes us happy, I guess. (But also: gross.)

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EPWordsnatcher 126p · 553 weeks ago

Welp, you did warn me.

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thewhelk 139p · 553 weeks ago

Balzac had a white monk's robe he wrote in and nearly killed himself with caffeine poisoning.

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Teka Lynn · 553 weeks ago

You spend most of your evenings in arch conversation and impenetrable slang with a charming older thief, with whom you might, or might not, have an affair. He'll be affable and charming either way.

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Teka Lynn · 553 weeks ago

Everyone thinks your daughters are actually your mistresses, and you do nothing to assure people to the contrary.

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Glen H · 553 weeks ago

Your unsuccessful attempts of revenge on those who love and patronise you resemble those of a 19 century French Wile E. Coyote.

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maggalina 15p · 553 weeks ago

I love this series more with every passing day.

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Tarrlok · 539 weeks ago

The opera only performs Rossini. Other composers don't exist. (Granted, most of these books were born before Verdi became a thing)

If you are a beautiful young bishounen artist, you will either become corrupted and sucessful, or corrupted but conflicted and eventually dead.

A lot of deadly, passionate love affairs end with just... kinda awkward breakup. The rest of them end with one or both parties committing suicide.

That guy who was a cameo in ten stories already? Here he is the hero!

Look, the hero of many other stories in a cameo!

Flashbacks to the Napoleonic wars.

You are either starving and thinking about jumping into the Seine or fucking bored high-class ladies who shower you in luxury. There is no middle ground. This might change several times within a book.

Husbands are either really dumb, too old to care, or let you fuck their wives as part of their diabolical plans.

Dammit, I need more Balzac.

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typewriterandgramophone 124p · 538 weeks ago

Just gonna leave this here: (Oh, and thank you Rachel for getting me on to Balzac.) http://plinytheyounger.tumblr.com/post/9097633601...

How To Tell If You’re In an Honoré de Balzac Novel

ByRachel Tapley

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