SOURCE: Majewski, Henry F. “Painting as Intertext in Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or.” Symposium 45, no. 1 (spring 1991): 370-84.

La Duchesse de Langeais andLa Fille aux yeux d'or are dedicated respectively to Lîszt and Delacroix. These two novels, from the trilogy L'Histoire des Treize, can be considered experimental novels in which Balzac shows his skill at developing interartistic parallels as musician and painter. La Duchesse includes a conscious attempt to reproduce musical structures in fiction; La Fille aux yeux d'or is almost a romantic “transposition d'art.” Balzac endeavors to produce aesthetic effects similar to those of Delacroix's paintings: a strange beauty elicited by images of violent passion. Through the use of pictorial description, color symbolism, and structural devices related to painting, he creates exotic “oriental” scenes in the midst of modern Paris, calculated to rival works like Hugo's Orientales and Delacroix's La Mort de Sardanapale.

Olivier Bonard has studied the role of painting in Balzac's early works, including Le Père Goriot.¹ He finds specific paintings (real or imagined) to be the point of departure of the narrative in texts like La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, Sarrazine and Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu. Characters and narrative situations develop from a picture named and described rather than from “realistic” or “objective” social observation. Examples are Girodet's Endymion for Sarrazine, Gros's La Bataille d'Eylau for “Le Colonel Chabert,” and the Flemish realists for other works. Balzac's narrator, for example, introduces Paquita Valdès, the girl with the golden eyes, as the incarnation of a figure from an ancient vase painting, the woman caressing her chimera. Georges Hirschell has minutely examined the relationships between Balzac and Delacroix as persons and artists as well as the color symbolism found in Delacroix's paintings and its analog in Balzac's stylistic technique in La Fille aux yeux d'or.²

This article attempts to analyze the function of Delacroix's paintings as intertexts: the ways in which specific paintings give structure and suggest meaning to the novel, and the narrative techniques used by Balzac that are apparently borrowed from painting, and, more specifically, from Delacroix's works. Any discussion of the intertextuality of painting in this novel must first examine the entire pattern of intertextual references that might appear to the reader to be unnecessarily copious and even contradictory.

Balzac's famous description of Paris as hell, in which he compares the spherical social structure of the city to the circles of Dante's Inferno, provides the novel with its organizing principle. A city dominated by “l'or et le plaisir” whose ascending movement from proletariat to aristocracy is degraded by the relentless pursuit of money is the setting for the tragic, corrupted love of Paquita, Henri de Marsay, and his sister, Euphemia. In a hellish city dominated by degraded values—human energy and potential wasted in the pursuit of money and sensual pleasure—life without a spiritual dimension produces a hellish love.

The role of Dante's Inferno as intertext is, however, more subtle and complex than has been established by previous critics. Balzac's narrator mentions only four circles of hell, or five, if we include the place of the artists. He does not mention the seventh circle in which are found those who have betrayed loved ones. Francesca da Rimini, who deceived her husband in favor of his brother, was relegated to this outer circle, and her story must be considered the original model of the triangle in this novel. Paquita betrays her lover, Euphémie, in favor of her brother, Henri de Marsay, thus creating an ironic modern version of Dante's triangle. The circular unity of the novel is complete; the tragic conclusion of betrayal and murder brings the reader back to the beginning of the text. Paquita's story can be situated in the secret center of Paris as hell, where the city's violence and cruelty are paradoxically the most acute.

Balzac uses intertextual reference to literature and myth in order to lure the reader; he suggests a variety of possible interpretations in order to surprise and astonish him with the impact of the final scenes. Reference to Delacroix's paintings arguably provides the reader with the clues required to make a more coherent and profound reading of La Fille aux yeux d'or.

Balzac's narrator compares his story to “une vieille comédie,” referring specifically to the “Barbier de Séville.” The reader is led to believe that De Marsay is struggling to attract the beautiful and innocent young Paquita away from the elderly gentleman who has raised and educated her for himself. The allusion to the plot of L'Ecole des femmes, with its traditional comic triangle, is reinforced by a reference to the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. The exquisite Paquita seems to have been “created” for the special pleasure of an aging Marquis. A comic and cynical tone is thus maintained throughout most of the main section of the novel; but certain references disconcert the reader. The first meeting of the lovers is compared to a scene from a Gothic novel of Ann Radcliffe. Its macabre setting hints at a tragic outcome. Paquita and her monstrous mother are compared to a “sirène” and her “chimère,” suggesting the destructive illusions of love. Near the end of the novel, Sade's Justine and Les Liaisons dangereuses are invoked as textual signs of perversion and cruelty.

De Marsay is compared to Adonis, but also to a serpent from the lost paradise. He is likened to a lion and a centaur but also to Othello, suggesting jealousy and betrayal. In an effort to give the fiction a philosophical dimension, Balzac describes De Marsay as Don Juan, Manfred, and above all, as a new Faust who is seeking the absolute in the form of perfect feminine sensuality and beauty. The myth of Faust is the most resonant textual allusion, suggesting the deepest meanings of the fiction. De Marsay's quest for the absolute leads to death and destruction because he has placed his ideal in a degraded mode: the search for “l'or et le plaisir,” infinite sensual pleasure without a spiritual dimension, hellish love in a hellish city.

With the Parisian dandy De Marsay as a modern Faust, the novel begins to resemble the series of Etudes philosophiques that Balzac was publishing at the same time, each (e.g., “La Peau de chagrin”) presenting a variation on the theme of human energy engaged in a death struggle against the limitations imposed on man by his physical and temporal condition.

An examination of the meanings suggested by the numerous textual and mythological references (far from exhausted in this account) thus suggests that the basically comic plot of La Fille [La Fille aux yeux d'or] is gradually transformed into a tragic one. Figaro is transformed into Faust, and the traditional love triangle is inverted to produce an almost Greek-like family tragedy replete with suggestions of incest and homosexuality.³

Delacroix's well-known works, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement (1834), painted the same year as La Fille was published and La Mort de Sardanapale (1828) are the specific works that play the role of intertext in this novel. Various sketches and paintings of animals being hunted or attacked by other animals, done even before Delacroix's trip to Morocco, are also represented in the fiction. In his lengthy prologue to the action of the novel, Balzac's narrator refers to the “petites peuplades heureuses qui vivent à l'orientale,”⁴ enclaves of beautiful women who somehow escape from the corrupting economic and social dynamics of the city to live in an intimate feminine refuge. In preserving their beauty they constitute an exception to the general degradation of the Parisian people Balzac has described in caricatural detail. Paquita's hotel is closed like a “harem oriental” (352) and she, the captive woman, is “un sérail” (336). Certainly conscious of Delacroix's trip to North Africa, Balzac suggests that it is not necessary to leave Paris to find scenes of extravagant luxury and sensuous beauty. He clearly intends his carefully composed descriptions of Paquita's boudoir to rival Delacroix's depiction of the exotic setting of the Algerian women.

The scenes in the harem-like atmosphere of the secret bedrooms are presented through the narrative distance of “scènes-tableaux.” This technique of pictorial description in which a scene is composed as if it were already a painting is characteristic of romantic writing from Chateaubriand to Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Balzac uses a painter's antithesis and violent contrast to distinguish between the first setting of the lovers' meeting, a sordid room resembling an abandoned bordello, dominated by harsh reds, greens, and yellows, and the elegant gilded boudoir where the lovers finally consumate their passion.

The second boudoir scene, elaborately detailed, is the best example of Balzac's particular kind of “transposition d'art” and illustrates his techniques with a virtuoso richness surpassing any similar attempts in his other novels.⁵ Lines, contours and forms are presented with an almost geometric precision; half the boudoir “décrivait une ligne circulaire mollement gracieuse, qui s'opposait à l'autre partie parfaitement carrée” (372). Curved and straight lines thus function as signifiers of the feminine and masculine principles that will confront each other here. In the ensuing description the forms are repeated and reinforced. The horseshoe curved frame behind the immense Turkish bed is surmounted by a red tapestry decorated with Indian muslin “cannelée comme l'est une colonne corinthienne” (372). The effect of straight columns is achieved by “des tuyaux alternativement creux et ronds” molded into the cloth upon which were designed the curved lines of “des arabesques noires” (372). The repetition and interplay of these forms suggests the careful composition of a painting and serves also as a signifying code for the lovers' encounter. Balzac pays close attention to the spatial arrangement of objects, and the source of light that illuminates their oriental richness, is carefully indicated: “Le plafond, au milieu duquel pendait un lustre en vermeil mat, étincelait de blancheur, et la corniche était dorée” (372). The point of view throughout the scene is that of the observer De Marsay who is aware that every element of the “tableau” has been calculated to produce desire.

The narrator indicates the play of light and shadow that seems to reproduce certain shimmering effects (almost preimpressionist) of Delacroix's color scheme: “Les chatoiements de la tenture, dont la couleur changeait suivant la direction du regard, en devenant ou toute blanche, ou toute rose, s'accordaient avec les effets de la lumière qui s'infusait dans les diaphanes tuyaux de la mousseline, en produisant de nuageuses apparences” (372). Balzac insists above all, on a pattern of color that dominates the composition, giving it its form and possible meanings. A prevalent scheme of white, gold, and red is established in the objects and flowers of the boudoir, and intensified almost to excess through the repetition of words indicating the presence of these colors and their variants, “rose,” “ponceau.” The word “rouge” is used nine times in a single paragraph, as if Balzac considered the repetition to constitute a series of “taches” or brush strokes on the canvas. Although Balzac attempts to focalize on De Marsay as direct witness of this “scène-tableau,” his narrator interprets the color symbolism and concludes the description with the kind of musical metaphor that Baudelaire will later apply to the paintings of Delacroix: “Il y avait dans cette harmonie parfaite un concert de couleurs auquel l'âme répondait par des idées voluptueuses, indécises, flottantes” (pp. 372-3).

There is thus a profound correspondence between color and human desire; the highly colored pictorial impression of the boudoir is intended to suggest unexpressed or even inexpressible needs and desires. In Balzac's view, the language of color is perhaps superior to that of words because its meanings are less restricted by conventional signifieds or denotations. Balzac's narrator concludes:

L'âme a je ne sais quel attachement pour le blanc, l'amour se plaît dans le rouge, et l'or flatte les passions, il a la puissance de réaliser leurs fantaisies. Ainsi tout ce que l'homme a de vague et de mystérieux en lui-même, toutes ses affinités inexpliquées se trouvaient caressées dans leurs sympathies involontaires.

(372)

The dominant color pattern—white, red, and gold—can therefore correspond to ideas and evoke qualities and desires both physical and spiritual. Colors as signifiers can attach themselves to multiple signifieds, thus producing complex, ambiguous signs, and potentially even expressing the most hidden inner world of the reader. When this boudoir scene is considered in the context of the entire novel, it is clear once again that its meanings are ambivalent. White stands for purity, red for love, and gold flatters the passions. The narrator, however, has neglected to analyze the fourth color in the scheme, named five times in the same passage—black. The vivid presence of black certainly foreshadows death and the tragedy to come; and the reader will soon discover that red connotes blood as well as passion.

The predominance of red, often identified with Delacroix's coloristic innovations, suggests the ambiguity at the center of the text. Red signifies passion and blood; or rather, passion is blood because “la volupté mène à la férocité” (382), as Balzac's narrator declares in the stated moral of the fiction. Sexuality and sensuality are inextricably linked to violence and cruelty in a world without spiritual values, where white suggests only an illusion of purity (Paquita is deceived but she is not innocent), and gold represents the degraded economic value of money as well as men's fantasies of fortune.

The pictorial description of the boudoir reveals the hidden meanings of the text to the reader contemplating the “tableau.” The conflict between the sexes is encoded in the formal pattern of objects, and the color scheme contains major themes common to Balzac's fiction and to Delacroix's painting: an exotic captive woman in a golden oriental setting; luxuriance of objects and of rich color evoking sensual passion, and the potential for violence and cruelty. At the end of the description of the boudoir, the narrator can convincingly introduce Paquita as “le chef-d'oeuvre de la création” (373), whose complexion is “chaudement coloré,” her beautiful skin “dorée par les reflets du rouge et par l'effusion de je ne sais quelle vapeur d'amour” (373).

Although Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement is arguably the intertext for the boudoir scenes in the novel, one cannot claim that Balzac is “imitating” the painting. The composition of Balzac's “scène-tableau” clearly differs from that of the picture (architectural details are not as prominent in the painting, and a group of women is present); and Balzac's color scheme is far more contrastive than the muted, warm tones of Delacroix's Femmes d'Alger. The color scheme that Balzac proposes—variations of white, red, gold, and black—corresponds more specifically to La Mort de Sardanapale, the other major “transposed” painting in the novel. Just as Les Femmes d'Alger situates and explains the role of Paquita, La Mort de Sardanapale develops the psychology of Henri de Marsay and gives him a legendary, archetypal resonance. Elements of this great painting are reproduced not by a specific scene, but by a series of allusions—themes, characters, metaphors—suggesting the importance of this intertextual reference.

During the melancholy initial encounter between De Marsay and Paquita, Balzac begins transforming his superficial Parisian dandy into a splenetic and disenchanted romantic hero. Totally bored with the facile pleasures of the city, he is “affamé de voluptés nouvelles,” and compared to “ce roi d'orient qui demandait qu'on lui créât un plaisir, soif horrible dont les grandes âmes sont saisies” (366). The ideal beauty of Paquita becomes in his imagination “l'infini rendu palpable” (366); his desire to possess her is presented as a Faustian quest for an absolute that alone would give Henri's existence a meaning.

According to the legend of Sardanapalus, the Assyrian despot realized the futility of defending his lands against invading hordes and ordered that his goods, his servants, and his women be burned with him on a funeral pyre. The legend was reinterpreted by the romantics,⁶ especially Byron, Delacroix, and Berlioz who found in it a contemporary image of despair or “mal du siècle.” As seen by the romantics, Sardanapalus is overcome with spleen before the tragic imperfections and limitations of the real world and dreams of pleasures and beauty beyond the mediocrity of existence. In spite of his power and great wealth, he chooses death and creates an extraordinary spectacle of destruction which, for a moment at least, will relieve him from a paralyzing boredom. Like Baudelaire's poet-narrator in “Au lecteur” and “Le Voyage,” prelude and conclusion to Les Fleurs du mal, he dreams of death in order to find “du nouveau.”⁷

Allusions to Sardanapalus and to aspects of Delacroix's painting that reinforce this reading of the legend are repeated throughout the rest of Balzac's text. During the initial encounter with Henri, Paquita is already seen as his potential victim, “absorbée comme une femme faible devant la hache du bourreau et tuée d'avance par une crainte …” (366). This phrase suggests the scene of carnage in the foreground of Delacroix's painting, especially the beautiful female figure who has abandoned herself to the King's assassin. De Marsay is described by the narrator as a man of great energy whose potential strength has been stimulated by his sexual desire for Paquita. Confidence in his sexuality appears to lead him to a sense of extraordinary power: “De Marsay exerçait le pouvoir autocratique du despote oriental” who “pouvait ce qu'il voulait dans l'intérêt de ses plaisirs et de ses vanités. Cette invisible action sur le monde social l'avait revêtu d'une majesté réelle” (369). Endowed now with a “conscience léonine” (369), de Marsay's character is magnified and generalized by the narrator who gives him a mythical dimension:

Les femmes aiment prodigieusement ces gens qui se nomment pachas eux-mêmes, qui semblent accompagnés de lions, de bourreaux, et marchent dans un appareil de terreur. Il en résulte chez ces hommes une sécurité d'action, une certitude de pouvoir, une fierté de regard, une conscience léonine qui réalise pour les femmes le type de force qu'elle rêvent toutes. Ainsi était de Marsay.

(369)

There is an obvious link between eroticism and death in Delacroix's painting, which made it disturbing to contemporary viewers. The sadistic killing of beautiful women on the immense bed of an indifferent king was a forceful and disturbing subject for a salon painting in 1828.⁸ Balzac understood, surely, the essential message of the picture, and in a series of boudoir scenes he, too, presents sexuality as a violently aggressive act. The final encounter between Paquita and De Marsay's sister, in which Paquita is brutally murdered, the red of her blood spattering the white furnishings of the secret room, is calculated to shock the reader as much as the Sardanapale was intended to shock the contemporary viewer.

In the third of the four boudoir scenes, when Paquita dresses Henri as a woman and calls him “Mariquita,” thus emasculating him and revealing his impotence, a violent struggle to the death occurs between the two lovers. This love-death combat is abruptly ended, however, by the faithful servant, Christemio the Moor. (His powerful figure seems to echo the imposing presence of the Moor in the foreground of Delacroix's painting where he is both assassin and doomed slave.) Ironically, the confrontation foreshadows the final love-death scene of the two women that Balzac's narrator will compare to a violent combat between two animals.

Both scenes contain several allusions to La Mort de Sardanapale and also to the numerous sketches and paintings of animal hunts that Delacroix painted throughout his career⁹. The frightened horse, who is being led to the funeral pyre in the left part of the foreground in the Sardanapale, is a constant motif in Delacroix's works. The figure of the strong animal, horse, lion, or tiger, as symbols of energy and passion falling victim to fate, is echoed by Balzac's numerous animal metaphors in the novel. De Marsay is often compared to animals of strength and prowess—lions, tigers, eagles—but also to animals with more negative connotations: he is clever as a monkey and resembles the serpent in a garden. Paquita is compared to a cat, her duegna to a hyena, and Christemio to a bird of prey. The animal imagery contributes to the “oriental” exoticism of the text and signals, as it does in most romantic writing, the baser nature of the Parisian lovers. When De Marsay is outraged by suspicion of Paquita's motives, the narrator declares: “il laissa éclater le rugissement du tigre dont une gazelle se serait moquée, le cri d'un tigre qui joignait à la force de la bête l'intelligence du démon” (381). The image of a tiger pursuing a gazelle accurately characterizes the plot of La Fille and evokes the cruel ironies of Delacroix's dramatic animal sketches in which he so masterfully portrays the tragic fate of the trapped animal.

In the final boudoir scene, De Marsay's sister brutally murders Paquita, whose body is “déchiqueté à coups de poignard” (392). Balzac represents the bloody end of the struggle through the eyes of De Marsay, who has arrived too late to prevent it. His sister has replaced the “bourreau” of Delacroix's painting, Balzac's narrator describing her as “sublime” when transported by an ecstasy of violence. Although covered with blood and bleeding herself, “Sa tête avide et furieuse respirait l'odeur du sang. Sa bouche haletante restait entrouverte, et ses narines ne suffisaient pas à ses aspirations. Certains animaux, mis en fureur, fondent sur leur ennemi, le mettent à mort, et, tranquilles dans leur victoire, semblent avoir tout oublié. Il en est d'autres, qui tournent autour de leur victime, qui la gardent en craignant qu'on ne la leur vienne enlever …” (392).

The irony of this final scene is enriched by reference to Delacroix's Sardanapale. De Marsay is a passive witness to the brutal murder that he has provoked. The act is committed not by Delacroix's moor (or Christemio in the novel), but by De Marsay's sister, thus emphasizing his own impotence. The paradox of the painting underlies that of the novel as well: De Marsay's apparent strength, his “leonine” prowess, conceals a profound weakness. Sardanapalus organized an elaborate suicide when confronted with the powerlessness of his situation. De Marsay does not even succeed in taking the “manly” vengeance he had planned on Paquita for her betraying him. By murdering her, his feminine double eliminates the sign of his weakness; his sister's sadistic love had a force he could never produce. This bloody, “oriental” denouement evokes the violence of a Delacroix animal hunt, and suggests Baudelaire's attraction for the beauty of evil. Not only does Balzac's narrator compare Euphémie (in her bloodthirst) to a ferocious animal; she is also like Homer's Achilles, who insisted on dragging his dead enemy nine times around Troy. Balzac admires the grandeur of her crime just as Baudelaire cites the strange beauty of extravagant criminal acts in the opening poem of Les Fleurs du mal.

The Parisian comedy has become a Greek tragedy of betrayal and vengeance acted out more or less “en famille.” After the murder, Euphémie takes final leave of her brother, whom she resembles both physically and morally: “Adieu, dit-elle, rien ne console d'avoir perdu ce qui nous a paru être l'infini” (394). Her words point to the deepest level of the tragedy in the context Balzac has created. De Marsay and his sister have placed the quest for the absolute in a degraded mode. The desire for an infinite of physical pleasure and beauty has replaced the quest for spiritual wisdom, artistic perfection, or scientific knowledge, those goals of Balzac's protagonists in the Etudes Philosophiques. Before the tragic end, the narrator has already characterized De Marsay as a modern Faust with the sexual drives of a Don Juan:

il trouva dans la Fille aux yeux d'or ce sérail que sait créer la femme aimante et à laquelle un homme ne renonce jamais. Paquita répondait à cette passion que sentent tous le hommes vraiment grands pour l'infini, passion mystérieuse si dramatiquement exprimée dans Faust, si poétiquement traduite dans Manfred, et qui poussait Don Juan à fouiller le coeur des femmes, en espérant y trouver cette pensée sans bornes à la recherche de laquelle se mettent tant de chasseurs de spectres, que les savants croient entrevoir dans la science, que les mystiques trouvent en Dieu seul. L'espérance d'avoir enfin l'Etre idéal avec lequel la lutte pouvait être constante sans fatigue, ravit de Marsay qui, pour la première fois, depuis longtemps, ouvrit son coeur.

(386)

De Marsay's particular kind of “mal du siècle” can largely be explained in La Fille aux yeux d'or by the corrupting influence of the modern city. The organizing principle of the text, “l'or et le plaisir” (as the narrator states in the prologue), determines De Marsay as well as the Parisians for whom he seems to be an exception. Paquita is both “or” and “plaisir” for him; the goal of his quest is not spiritual love but the inexhaustible riches of sensuality. His search is permeated by a deep materialism, and the luxury of the dandy's self-created image is the tool of seduction. Balzac's De Marsay is the necessary product of a city whose degraded values, money and pleasure, have replaced an authentic spiritual life. The “hellish” loves of De Marsay and his sister for the golden victim are played out not in an oriental harem but in the hell of modern Paris, where human energy is perverted and dissipated in the economic spiral of social mobility.

Balzac's rich and complex use of color imagery is found throughout the text and constitutes a kind of tribute to Delacroix, whose painting was both praised and criticized for its innovative color schemes. The color red, associated particularly with Delacroix, is an ambiguous sign in the novel and situated at the center of its meanings, a symbol of passion, blood, and suffering. Gold is also laden with multiple meanings: the mysterious richness promised by Paquita's eyes, oriental sensuality, and the supreme value of modern Paris, an ambiguous sign, connoting pleasure as well as money and moral decay. Balzac utilizes strong color contrasts and the dramatic play of light and darkness, important elements of Delacroix's technique. Paquita's golden richness is contrasted with the dark (noire) beauty of De Marsay's sister. In spite of her brilliance, Paquita has lived in the darkness (les ténèbres) waiting for the light (lumière) Henri can bring.

A special use of color is also found in the Prologue of the novel to describe the city and its hierarchical spiral of inhabitants. Although the novel is appropriately dedicated to Delacroix, the prologue more clearly suggests Daumier, who was the real painter of Parisian life during the years of the July Monarchy. Rather than the bright colors associated with Delacroix's paintings, Balzac's narrator uses grays, blue, and brown to caricature his Parisians. The Parisian face has become “grise comme le plâtre des maisons” (326), and the unique struggle for money “décolore, blêmit, bleuit, et brunit plus ou moins les individus” (326). Determined by the profound materialism of his life, the Parisian's physiognomy reveals a “teinte presque infernale” (326). The populace is a “peuple horrible à voir, hâve, jaune, tanné” (325). Balzac repeats colors, or verbs suggesting color, to evoke brush strokes or a dominant color scheme on the canvas. Thus, the worker in the outer circle of hell who uses his energy to prepare objects for the rich

dore les porcelaines, coud les habits et les robes, amincit le fer, amenuise le bois, tisse l'acier, solidifie le chanvre et le fil, satine les bronzes, festonne le cristal, imite les fleurs, brode la laine, dresse les chevaux, tresse les harnais et les galons, découpe le cuivre, peint les voitures, arrondit les vieux ormeaux, vaporise le coton, souffle les tuls, corrode le diamant, polit les métaux, transforme en feuilles le marbre, lèche les cailloux, toilette la pensée, colore, blanchit et noircit tout.

(327)

In the Prologue, activities are enumerated, color symbols superabound, and verbs of action and color seem self-generating. This verbal excess suggests the harsh dark lines in a Daumier caricature. When he takes his pleasure, for example, the worker does so in a “lassante débauche brune de peau, noire de tapes, blême d'ivresse, ou jaune d'indigestion …” (327). For each class in the social spiral, Balzac creates a caricature, a generalized portrait of its typical representatives, emphasizing with comic intensity the negative effects of social and economic pressure. The petit bourgeois “persiste à vivre et vit, mais crétinisé: vous le rencontrez à face usée, plate, vieille, sans lueur aux yeux, sans fermeté dans la jambe, se trainant d'un air hébété sur le boulevard” (330). Balzac's harshest picture is reserved for the grand bourgeois, lawyer, doctor, or judge, the major subjects of Daumier's cartoons: “leurs figures s'arrondissent, s'aplatissent, se rougissent” (332). When they have achieved social standing “leurs figures offrent … cette pâleur aigre, ces colorations fausses, ses yeux ternis, cernés, ces bouches bavardes et sensuelles où l'observateur reconnaît les symptômes de l'abâtardissement de la pensée …” (333).

La Fille aux yeux d'or, like La Duchesse de Langeais might be read as important experiments in the interrelation of the arts. Balzac attempted to create with words an impact resembling that of painting—the negative impact of Daumier's satirical drawings, the exotic beauty of Delacroix's colored images of violence and passion. The use of “scènes-tableaux” forces the reader to be a viewer, to contemplate and “decode” the meanings found in the formal patterns. The scene transformed into a picture prepares for the drama to follow through a description of the décor, and contains a complex, constructed signifying system. Pictorial description, color symbolism and intertextual references to paintings and sketches are, in the last analysis, more important than the subject matter of the novel.

Seen in the context of nineteenth-century fascination with possible “correspondances,” Balzac's “oriental” novel is a major contribution to the long and controversial history of interants comparisons.¹⁰ In spite of the fundamental limitations inherent in any attempt to transpose one medium into another, in this case fixed visual imagery into a text evolving in time, La Fille aux yeux d'or is perhaps the best and most successful example of a romantic “transposition d'art” in novelistic form. It richly complements Hugo's exotic picture-poems in the Orientales, Delacroix's highly literary paintings and illustrations from Shakespeare and Faust, and Berlioz's many transcriptions of fictional works, including the regrettably lost music for the death of Sardanapalus.

Notes

1. La Peinture dans la création balzacienne: Invention et vision picturales de la Maison du Chat-qui-pelote au Père Goriot (Geneva: Droz, 1969). A partial refutation of Bonard's book is found in Jean-Loup Bourget's article, “Balzac et le pictural,” Romantic Review 64.4 (1973): 286-295.

2. Georges Hirschell, Balzac und Delacroix, Streiflichter auf den Roman, La Fille aux yeux d'or, Bâle, 1946.

3. Shoshanna Felman has subtly analyzed the novel's complex psychological significance for the modern reader in “Rereading Feminity,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 19-44.

4. Balzac, La Fille aux yeux d'or, in Oeuvres complètes, 28 vols. (Paris: Guy le Prat, 1961) 9: 337. Subsequent references to the novel will be to this edition and cited in the text.

5. The description of Frenhofer's studio, for example, in Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, which is calculated to evoke the same effects as Rembrandt's chiaroscuro, or the realistic Flemish painting by Sommervieux in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote.

6. Jack J. Spector discusses the sources for Delacroix's painting as well as Byronic romanticism and the psychological background in general (Delacroix: The Death of Sardanapalus [New York: Viking Press, 1974]). Byron's play Sardanapalus (1821) impressed the French romantics, including Berlioz, who composed a cantata on the subject in 1831, entitled La dernière Nuit de Sardanapale.

7. It has been suggested that Baudelaire's introductory poem was, in part, inspired by Delacroix's painting. “Au lecteur” presents the portrait of those whose corrosive “ennui” leads to dreams of violence and destruction: “Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris / Et dans un baillement avalerait le monde.”

8. Jack J. Spector analyzes the painting as a projection of Delacroix's own sadistic sexual fantasies and situates it in the context of romantic imagery (Delacroix: The Death of Sardanapalus).

9. Delacroix painted most of his scenes of lion and tiger hunts after his trip to North Africa in 1832, thus after the publication of La Fille aux yeux d'or (1834). Under the influence of Géricault and George Stubbs, however, he had already produced violent drawings of animals, especially horses during the 1820's. Balzac was probably acquainted with some of these works, such as the lithographs of the “Wild Horse” and the “Horse attacked by a Tiger” (1828), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

10. Wendy Steiner's The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1982) begins with a detailed examination of the history of the interarts comparison from Antiquity to the present. It includes an illuminating structuralist analysis of William Carlos Williams's Pictures from Breughel.