SOURCE: Heathcote, Owen. “Balzac's Go-between: The Case of Honorine.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 22, nos. 1 & 2 (fall-winter 1993-94): 61-76.

[In the following essay, Heathcote explores the representation of the themes of creation, dissolution, and recreation of difference in Honorine in terms of space, time, sexuality, and language.]

Honorine is one of Balzac's most haunting narratives. It is the story of a young woman, Honorine, who, having deserted her devoted husband, Octave,¹ because she cannot requite his affections, has a son by an unnamed lover who deserts her in his turn. After her son's early death, Honorine withdraws into a secret retreat in Paris in order to live independently off her own industry—the creation of artificial flowers. Equally secretly, however, her husband Octave discovers her whereabouts, subsidizes her sales of flowers, and invades her privacy through his emissary and spokesman, Maurice, who takes up residence next door to Honorine's retreat. Although Honorine is eventually persuaded to return to Octave with whom she has a second son, she is still unable to love her husband. She declines and dies. Her story is later recounted by an older, married Maurice at a dinner-party in Genoa, in honor of the writer Camille Maupin. Overhearing the story, Maurice's wife, Onorina, realizes that Maurice never really loved her, despite his outward devotion: like Octave, he really loved Honorine and she has been a ‘real’ substitute for her husband's lost ‘ideal.’

The framing of the récit of Honorine in the métarécit of Maurice's narrative has a double, apparently contradictory, effect on the story.² On the one hand, récit and métarécit are separated in time and in space: enough time has elapsed for Maurice to mature, marry, have two diplomatic postings and two children; Octave, having aged considerably, has left the social and professional scene; Honorine has died; the setting has shifted from Paris to Genoa.³ On the other hand, this temporal and spatial separation enables links to be made across the very divide that has just been created. Récit-cadre and récit-tableau are both distinguished and linked by the juxtaposition of a living Onorina and a dead Honorine, a juxtaposition that is, moreover, highlighted by one of Maurice's audience, another woman, the author Camille Maupin:

Les hommes ne sont-ils pas coupables aussi de venir à nous, de faire d'une jeune fille leur femme, en gardant au fond de leurs cœurs d'angéliques images, en nous comparant à des rivales inconnues, à des perfections souvent prises à plus d'un souvenir et nous trouvant toujours inférieures?

(596)

Thus, in what has been called the méta-métarécit of Honorine,⁴ a woman-author exposes one of the constants of male behavior: although men distinguish between different times, spaces, women, and languages, they also tend to confuse them.⁵ Honorine exists for Maurice as a kind of temporal, spatial, linguistic and sexual palimpsest, preceding and overshadowing her virtual homonym, Onorina. Camille Maupin, however, while noting the similarities between Honorine and Onorina, rejects the contamination of one by the other and chooses to emphasize their difference. In this way, Maurice—and Octave before him—can be seen as men of the past, whereas Camille Maupin can be seen as a woman of the future.

One of the main themes in Honorine is, therefore, the creation, dissolution and re-creation of difference, and the relationship of the characters to that difference. Since difference and the characters' relationship to difference are so important and represented in terms of space, time, sexuality, and language, these four areas will now be examined in turn.⁶

SPACE

One of the most obvious yet subtle themes in Honorine is that of space. From the opening words of the méta-métarécit Balzac identifies the characteristics of national groups, endorsing the popularity of travel with the English and its disfavor with the French. They are probably both right since, as Balzac remarks, “on trouve partout quelque chose de meilleur que l'Angleterre, tandis qu'il est excessivement difficile de retrouver loin de la France les charmes de la France” (525). While it would be easy to see this as simply another example of Balzac's anglophobia,⁷ what is more important here is that he immediately finds an exception to the latter part of his remark and plunges the reader into a Saint-Germain style dinner-party in Genoa. Having claimed the French are travel-shy, he finds a group who, for professional or personal reasons, make a habit of it. Having tightened the exclusion-zone round France, the French, Paris, and the Parisians, he finds quintessential Frenchness abroad, in Genoa. In thus simultaneously affirming and denying the definability of his characters in terms of space and race, Balzac is simultaneously affirming and denying his own definition of identity and difference. He thereby exposes the arbitrariness of the very distinctions he seems at such pains to establish. This arbitrariness becomes even more apparent when he refers to two Italians at the dinner as “deux Français déguisés en Génois” (527). If these “Français” are not “Français” but Italians, then difference seems able to pass as its opposite—if, that is, difference still has any meaning in this context. What may, therefore, seem to be a mere quip, can also be seen to confirm that the nature of identity and difference in Honorine is not in fact either/or but neither/and: like other celebrated seeming opposites in Balzac such as movement and resistance,⁸ inclusion and exclusion coexist within each other. Difference has become (mere) disguise; identity and its other rotate in rapidly alternating or cumulative succession.

If France has, moreover, invaded Italian space to the point that difference has become disguise, it is hardly surprising that the reality of Genoa as a foreign city seems itself in jeopardy. The company at the dinner-party are perched in a French consulate above and outside the city, and they are near “cette fameuse lanterne qui, dans les keepsakes, orne toutes les vues de Gênes”(526). Parisians could, therefore, “encore se croire à Paris,” and think that they are looking at the reproduction and not the reality. The city has become (mere) vista, (mere) view.⁹ What seems to be singular and different is, therefore, in danger of being coopted, commodified, domesticated, and generalized like the infinitely reproducible art of the keepsake. Here again, it is not a case of disguise reproducing guise, art reproducing life, but of life reproducing art. Or, rather, of both. Identity has become mediation. In both senses, a model.

Given the threat to identity posed by the view over Genoa, it is fitting that Maurice, who lives with this threat, gives a detailed description of earlier, more protective spaces—the hôtel in the Marais owned by his then employer, le comte Octave, and the retreat where Honorine fashions her flowers.¹⁰ Octave's hôtel is dark, secluded, echoing. Like Octave himself it has vast internal “souterrains” (549, see 539)¹¹ that are dimly lit and as yet dimly perceived. Contrary to expectations, the day of this Parisian Marais is gloomier than the twilight of Genoa: in another reversal, Paris is a sombre center and Genoa the brilliant periphery.

Equally contrary to expectations, the womb-tomb that Octave inhabits proves no more protective of identity than the open-air vistas of Genoa. The secret of his wife's elopement is revealed, in an unguarded moment over dinner in the intimacy of his hôtel, by a trusted friend and colleague. It is, moreover, in the privacy of his hôtel that Octave works as legal adviser to the government, that he prepares his public life, his work for the French State. Public and private spaces are, therefore, eminently permeable, with Octave seeing his private life made public at home,¹² and with public affairs openly discussed at home but kept secret both in public and from the public of France (545).

The permeability of private space is also evidenced by Honorine's supposedly secret retreat. Although her house is so undisturbed and inaccessible that “on se trouvait dans ce séjour à cent lieues de Paris” (566), it is with relative ease, if at considerable expense, that it is penetrated first by Octave and then by Maurice. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly that her house is “une ancienne maison de plaisir” (561), a former “bonbonnière inventée par l'art du dix-huitième siècle pour les jolies débauches d'un grand seigneur” (566). However much Honorine seeks to (re-)privatize this former almost embarrassingly public space with trellises, tapestries, and flowers (566-567), the eighteenth-century artifice of its origins remains, like the aforementioned palimpsest, eminently apparent.¹³ In addition the eminently natural, flower-like Honorine then spends her time manufacturing artificial flowers, which she sells on what she thinks is an open, public market, but that is, in fact, privately, secretly subsidized by Octave. Here, too, there is a complex, almost unravelable, interweaving of public and private, guise and disguise, involving space, time, sexuality and art, which is painstakingly rewoven by Honorine herself, as she repeatedly recreates her eminently reproducible artificial flowers. Her endeavors, like those of other indefatigable workers in the narrative, Octave, Grandville, Sérizy and Maurice himself, and of course, of the artist Camille Maupin, continually work and rework on the blending of private and public spaces in what Félix de Vandenesse elsewhere calls “le travail que nécessitent les idées pour être exprimées.”¹⁴

The interplay of guise and disguise, public and private in Honorine is further complicated by the presence of mediators and intermediaries who are, like the keepsake and le travail, infinitely reproducible and relayable. Prominent among such intermediaries is Maurice's uncle, the abbé Loraux, curé des Blancs-Manteaux, whose metaphorically white guise/disguise contrasts with the triumvirate of “les magistrats noirs”:¹⁵ Octave himself and his colleagues Sérizy and Grandville. Like many of Balzac's priests, Loraux crosses and confuses public and private, sacred and secular, as he shuttles between Octave, Maurice, and Honorine, arranging careers, meetings, and reconciliations. The priests are politicians (546, 577) and the politicians are ascetics (541, 545) in a transposition of categories whose initial distinction belies and yet betokens the later merging of their physical and conceptual territories.¹⁶

There is another, perhaps final twist to the spatial loopings in Honorine—the character of the narrator, Maurice himself. Maurice, whose first ambition was to be a great actor (534), who is adopted and launched by the quintessential mediator, the priest, who is again adopted by the statesman and interpreter of legal documents, Octave, to interpret in his turn, to relay his master's ideas (543) and eventually to replace him both at work and vis-à-vis his wife. Maurice is later transplanted first to Spain and then to Italy, where, once again, as a diplomat, he relays the ideas of others, and, as host, entertains guests with some-one else's story … The succession and accumulation of these various substitutions and mediations make Maurice into one of Balzac's most elusive yet intrusive narrators. An almost literal porte-parole, he carries copies of the tripartite correspondence between himself, Octave, and Honorine (583), in a portefeuille that he asks his substitute wife to fetch in order to remove her from the dinner-party and his narrative (531). Every move for Maurice has to be at one or several removes. He is invariably either next(door) or in-between. Indeed his major task, when living in the adjacent property to Honorine's retreat, is to pretend to want to build an intervening wall between the properties, though that, too, like Honorine's flower-bower, and Thaddée Paz's fausse maîtresse, is not only a screen but a false screen: “homme-écran.” Maurice is not only function but fictitious function, not only vehicle but, in a sense, chimère. Would-be actor, translator, emissary and spy, Maurice is the epitome of a literature where “tout y est mythe et figure.”¹⁷

TIME

As has already been indicated above, the passing of time is important in Honorine, bringing about, within the space of a short nouvelle, the early aging of Octave,¹⁸ the death of Honorine herself, and tracing Maurice's “début dans la vie” from early student days through his first appointment with Octave to subsequent career, marriage and children. The very act of narration itself emphasizes the remoteness, even the irretrievability, of the past. The reception the narrative receives from Camille Maupin's Parisian escorts further highlights the disparity between Maurice's past experiences and current Parisian thinking: Claude Vignon sees Maurice as “un peu fat” and Léon de Lora is amazed that Honorine managed to survive in Paris “[sans] se crotter dans la rue” (596).¹⁹ Camille Maupin herself closes the story with a remark that seals the whole episode: “Il se trouve encore de grandes âmes dans ce siècle” (597). The trio of Honorine, Octave and Maurice are thus made to seem the admirable but now fast-receding reminders of a bygone age. These reactions recall Natalie de Manerville's sharp rejoinder to Félix de Vandenesse's account of another mal mariée and of another irretrievable and unfulfilled love. In both cases, the memories of a young would-be chevalier servant provoke bemusement, irony, and the suspicion that he, rather than time, is out of joint.

What is it, however, that prompts the bemusement, the irony, and the interrogation of a Camille Maupin who, like Mme de Rochefide at the end of Sarrasine, “demeura pensive”? Is it that the unrequited love-affair between Honorine, Octave, and Maurice belongs to a past overthrown by the “révolution de Juillet” that ends Octave's career?²⁰ Should the new regime that followed see the end of courtly romances, amor de lonh, and chansons de toile, all connoted by Honorine and her flower-bower? Perhaps, too, it is irritation with an Octave who is similarly frozen in time, spending seven or nine years²¹ waiting and hoping for reconciliation but acting, when he does act, in a way that almost invalidates that action: he invariably moves par personne interposée, whether through prête-noms to purchase Honorine's retreat, or his secretary-go-between, Maurice, to reach Honorine, or through intercessors such as the curé des Blancs-Manteaux. Perhaps the impatience of Camille Maupin, Léon de Lora, and Claude Vignon, does indeed reflect the impatience of the new July monarchy towards a minister promoted by Mme la Dauphine, duchesse d'Angoulême, daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and daughter-in-law to Charles X (532). Octave would, from the perspective of 1836 when Maurice's narrative is told, seem to represent Louis-Philippe's more conservative, unimaginative, nostalgic predecessor, unwilling or unable to deal with corrupt servants (“L'abandon de ses intérêts allait, chez le comte, jusqu'à la bêtise dans la conduite de ses affaires” 542), or to move out of sterile, cocooning spaces, whether former decadent eighteenth-century boudoirs or the backwater that is the Marais. As Anne Martin-Fugier points out: “Le vieux centre de Paris évoque un univers étriqué.”²² From the moment of his employment with Octave, the young Maurice is, therefore, frozen in time like Honorine, and even Parisian-style dinners in keepsake-like settings such as romanticized Genoa seem similarly ‘frozen’ and cloistered (cf. 597) to a Camille Maupin “avare de ses instants” and reluctant to sacrifice a rare day of freedom (527). From this perspective, all the settings in Honorine are static rather than dynamic, retrospective rather prospective, resistance rather than movement. Designed as they are for a trio of Balzac's “cœurs blessés,” they are designed to be out of time as of out of space, in order to foster inertia, amnesia, and silence.

Although such perspectives are certainly evident in the novel, they cannot be endorsed without some reservations. Unlike many of Balzac's young hopefuls, such as Eugène de Rastignac, Lucien de Rubempré, Calyste du Guénic, Félix de Vandenesse, Maurice is, it seems, an orphan with no aristocratic connections. He has, at least initially, no name.²³ He is, however, like other Balzacian arrivistes, ambitious for social and sexual success, and can barely be contained by his priestly uncle (534) and the ascetic Octave, who generously pays off his gambling debts (544). Given Maurice's background, and even though he rejects marriage with the young and wealthy Amélie de Courteville, “une maîtresse idéale” (560), it is perhaps not surprising that he continues to contain himself with the equally parentless, nameless Honorine (550, see 578),²⁴ eventually preferring Onorina Pedrotti, a woman wealthy in her own right, with powerful relations and protectors, both titled and rich from trade and commerce. Maurice finally marries into an aristocracy whose work actually pays—unlike Honorine and her flowers. In this he shows that, however fascinated he was or is by the unfortunate retro Honorine, he does not totally forget his youthful ambitions for fame, fortune and future.

It can be seen that the representation of time in Honorine is as ambivalent as the representation of space. If Honorine seems to represent the past, or if the past is represented by Honorine, she is paradoxically, a past with less past than future: her ancestry is a blank but she seems to be available to Maurice in constant and total recall. If Onorina seems to represent the future, then she also seems to antedate the past that is the narrativized Honorine and yet her future may be shorterlived. Given that Octave is now departed, it can be argued that Maurice is, at the time of narration, suspended between an irretrievable past that is Honorine and a present without future that is Onorina. He is poised between a son who is not his—since he is likely to “inherit” the son of Honorine—and his own children who are, however “deux enfants silencieux, parce que le sommeil les a saisis” (527). With Maurice thus poised between non-self and silence, it is hardly surprising that, like Camille Maupin, he should resort to narrative to occupy the void. Let us hope that, unlike her, he does not renounce his voice and enter the further non-self and silence of a religious order.²⁵

SEXUALITY AND GENDER

Before discussing the role of narrative and language in Honorine it will, however, be useful to turn to a third area of ambiguity and complexity—that of sexuality and gender. For if space and time are dual, so too are the women in the novel: Honorine/Onorina; Camille Maupin/Félicité des Touches. Indeed, as so frequently in Balzac's work, with its “unité composée, unité variable, unité fixe,”²⁶ and with the recurrent motif of “tout est double” and homo duplex,²⁷ such twinning and even tripling can be seen to apply not only to the women but to all the characters. If Octave and Maurice are, in a sense, like Gaston and Louise in Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, “deux éditions du même ouvrage,”²⁸ all the other characters tend to come in twos and threes, from the children (both Honorine and Onorina have two each), to the diplomats (Octave, Sérizy, Grandville), priests (les curés de Saint-Paul et des Blanc-Manteaux—546), Camille Maupin's two escorts (Léon de Lora and Claude Vignon), and even the aforementioned “deux Français déguisés en Génois.” As elsewhere in Balzac, all the characters or groups of characters in Honorine seem to be affected by a kind of spontaneous multiplication or self-generation, a kind of seemingly unsexualized cross-fertilization that operates across one generation, and within the same sex, rather than between different generations and different sexes. Reproduction does, therefore, cut across space and time at least as much as it develops over or through space and time. Reproduction seems to be both horizontal and vertical, both synchronic and diachronic. In this way it both reflects—and reproduces—the ambivalences already noted in the representation of time and space in the novel.

The above-mentioned cross-fertilization of characters is, moreover, complemented by a kind of sexual self-sufficiency made possible by a sexual polyvalence that again seems to affect both sexuality and gender, both biology and role. If Félicité des Touches, “cet être amphibie qui n'est ni homme ni femme,”²⁹ has a male nom de plume, Honorine also asks of herself: “suis-je une femme? je suis un garçon doué d'une âme tendre” (572), of whom Maurice can say “elle n'avait plus rien de la femme” (569). Maurice, too, while remaining celibate, seems to see sexuality in primarily relational terms, adapting his position to complement that of his partner or partners. Thus he plays the role of a kind of maternal husband vis-à-vis Honorine while becoming a kind of substitute wife (or husband, given Octave's “mains de femme” 537) to Octave. As he says of their relationship: “L'union de ces deux esprits est à la fois plus et moins qu'un mariage” (539).

Elsewhere in the narrative gender roles cross, combine, and proliferate in familiar Balzacian fashion. Octave sees himself as Honorine's brother, mother and father (587, 588) and Maurice sees Octave as a second father (536) and the curé des Blancs-Manteaux as a second mother (535, 536). Thus, although Balzac does not actually deny sexual difference and gender roles, he subjects them to sufficient textual play as to expose them as constructed categories. Thus Honorine, like Sarrasine for Sandy Petrey, “maintains the verbal opposition between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ against its own refutation of the opposition's extraverbal validity.”³⁰ Sexuality, like time and space, is a means for constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing relationships of proximity and distance, of anteriority and posteriority. Hence the remark of Camille Maupin, quoted above, characterizing men's desire as a juxtaposition of past and future, not unlike the palimpsest. Or, in the celebrated words of Claudine du Bruel: “L'espoir est une mémoire qui désire.”³¹

If sexuality is constructed as a wanting and as a separation,³² it is not surprising that Honorine is peopled by characters who are sexually unproductive for most of their lives. Of the four children mentioned above, one, Honorine's first son, dies, and her second is to be passed from her, to Octave, and then to Maurice. Maurice's children are, as has been noted, silent and then dismissed. The principal characters of the récit are all, for one reason or another, celibate, restrained by celibates, or sexually abstinent: from the young Maurice whose sexual desires are barely contained by an understanding uncle (534) to an Octave who holds himself back on the threshold of infidelity (552), and to the divorced or separated statesmen and celibate priests, the characters in Honorine repress and deny their sexuality. Even in the métarécit Camille Maupin travels with men with whom she has no sexual relationship, just as she refuses to allow herself to become involved with Calyste in Béatrix. This repeated sexual denial can be seen to combine with the above-mentioned proliferation and transfers of gender roles to construct an identity characterized by instability, transition, and disguise. The roles proliferate over a vacuum. Or, as again Sandy Petrey writes: “Balzac's representational prose, no less than Mallarmé's antirepresentational poetry, is in eccentric orbit around a void.”³³

Given the way sexualities are deconstructed and constructed in Honorine, it seems inevitable, if symptomatic, that the relationship between Honorine and her lover be elided, almost erased from the narrative. Neither Honorine nor Octave gives any indication whatsoever of the identity of the lover—where, when, and how they met or how, where, and for how long they were together. The only residual evidence of the relationship's passing itself passes away with the death of Honorine's first son, who seems, moreover, to be further erased with the birth of her son by Octave. Furthermore, Octave explains Honorine's absence by inventing a fictitious journey on “un paquebot anglais” (592), the Cécile, to Havana, to collect the inheritance from a deceased relative and it is feared that Honorine and the boat are lost. The multiple distancing achieved through silence, sea-journey, foreignness, and death either real or imagined, determines, indeed over determines, the elision of female sexuality and desire.

Even this, however, is not enough. Fictitious absence is followed by voluntary exile, and an exile that further erases any evidence of Honorine's sexual desire. For in the retreat Honorine becomes neither mortified like “le quelque chose sans nom de Bossuet” that is Henriette de Mortsauf on her deathbed, nor a grotesque caricature of depravity like Béatrix de Rochefide. On the contrary, Honorine's decline and death occur when she returns to Octave.³⁴ In her retreat she remains a child (564), “une colombe blessée” (575), a fairy (568), for Octave “une blanche statue” (552), as seemingly innocent, pure, and virginal as before she eloped. She even outshines a “real” innocent, Amélie de Courteville (561, see 584). In thus giving Honorine both desire and non-desire, knowledge and non-knowledge,³⁵ Balzac makes her almost impossibly split. As Nicole Ward Jouve writes of Marie de Vandenesse: “Sex goes through Marie like a dividing line.”³⁶ Honorine is, therefore, like Marie, a “constructed chimera,”³⁷ a kind of female Christ—except that unlike Christ she is stigmatized without the stigmata. Hers is a sexuality which, like her flowers, are both bloom and artifice, plenitude and void. Her sexuality is the non-existent center of Balzac's world: speculum de l'autre, femme. As Irigaray also writes: “Il n'y aurait donc pas de représentation possible, d'histoire de l'économie de sa libido pour la femme.”³⁸ Or, as Dorothy Kelly writes of Sarrasine: “The truth of a woman's gender is never revealed. … One only gets more veils, more enigmas, and never reaches the truth of woman.”³⁹

Women's sexual identity is further jeopardized by the way in which maternity and children are repeatedly delegitimated in the novel. Although Honorine seems to erase an illegitimate relationship and a dead illegitimate son by returning to her husband, the promised adoption of her legitimate son by her would-be lover, Maurice, destabilizes two family groups: the erstwhile family Honorine-Octave-son; the new family Onorina-Maurice-children. Women are, therefore, betrayed by their own maternity into delegating their sexual status to children who, as the signs and bearers of legitimacy and illegitimacy, expose themselves and their mothers to the mobility of these precise categories. Both mother and child become simply go-betweens between fathers. Moreover, by illegitimately overhearing the account of Honorine and Maurice's potentially illegitimate relationship, and by the potential adoption of Honorine's son, Onorina, in her turn, repeats the delegitimating of her own marriage, motherhood, and sexuality. If neither purity, sensuality nor even motherhood can give women a legitimate sexual identity, it is hardly surprising that they are reduced to death, the convent, or silence.

LANGUAGE

Although both Honorine's sexually fulfilled relationship, and the apparent sexual incompatibility between her and her husband, are both sealed in silence, such silence is rather less than total in other works. Despite the parallels that have been drawn between the opacity of Honorine and Véronique Graslin,⁴⁰ the desires and frustrations of other women in Balzac are made much more explicit. It is clear that women such as Dinah de la Baudraye, Béatrix de Rochefide, and the comtesse de Sérizy, seek outside marriage the fulfillment of a desire that their husbands are either unable or unwilling to satisfy within it. Even Henriette de Mortsauf betrays more of her frustrations and longings than Honorine. It is, therefore, necessary to relate the silences of Honorine the woman to the silences in Honorine the novel where, as Alain has pointed out, “tout est profondément caché.”⁴¹ This will then lead to further comments on Balzac's narrative, language and discourse.

“Probité, travail, et discrétion.”⁴² These words of Jean-Jérôme-Séverin Cardot to his nephew Oscar Husson in Un début dans la vie could be a motto for all the characters in Maurice's story. The characters, whether statesmen or priests, are, as Balzac emphasizes in the méta-métarécit, noted for their discretion: “Un homme n'est jamais diplomate impunément: le sposo fut discret comme la tombe” (592). The devastation caused by the revelations of Honorine's desertion to Octave, and of Octave's love for Honorine to Onorina, bears witness to the value placed by all the characters on tact, the weighed word, and discretion. It is partly because Maurice does not, though a diplomat, fully weigh his words, that Claude Vignon sees him as “un peu fat” (596). It is partly because Maurice is speaking in the company of writers—not only Camille Maupin but his ambassador, “un écrivain très distingué” (527)—that words assume such importance, with the unwitting being eschewed in favor of the witty, and hyperbole giving way to understatement, “ce génie du sous-entendu, la moitié de la langue française” (525). In other words, if a place (Genoa) and a time (after-dinner conversation) provoke a particular narrative, verbal interventions themselves need to be finely timed and appropriately placed.⁴³ There is, therefore, a similar homology between time, space, and language as was indicated above between time, space and gender.

It is, moreover, possible to see a homology between all four categories. As part of that “jurisprudence humaine et sociale” into which Maurice, like so many other Balzacian characters, is gradually being initiated, language also needs to respect what Octave refers to as “ces lois du code féminin méconnues” (533).⁴⁴ As Henriette de Mortsauf might say: “Noblesse oblige.” For language by and for Honorine is as finely controlled as the delicate floral poetry she crafts in her atelier. She, the “femme-fleur,” poeticizes her workshop (567) and, like Félix de Vandenesse, develops and deploys a whole language in flowers: “La botanique exprime, je crois, toutes les sensations et les pensées de l'âme, même les plus délicates!” (568). The novel does, therefore, unite a variety of workers in language—diplomats, priests, artists, writers, and women—whose watchword is almost wordless: for the count “‘Je souffre et je me tais.’” (541); for his wife “On ne m'a donné qu'un nom, Honorine” (578). Language seems therefore to be defined in terms of its opposite, reduced (or elevated) to a position of supplementarity. Like time, space, and gender, language is orbiting round a void.

Given that language in Honorine is represented as an essentially private affair, the public and publicity are shunned. As Balzac writes of himself in the Preface to Le Lys dans la vallée: “Il a sur la promiscuité des sentiments personnels et des sentiments fictifs une opinion sévère et des principes arrêtés.”⁴⁵ The difficulty of avoiding such publicity and such prostitution is, however, made manifest in Honorine by the repeated references to literature and the theater. Willingly or otherwise, the characters repeat the already seen and said, and thereby both accrue past publicity and become available for future publication. Maurice is a littéraire manqué (533) who talks literature to his literary guests (530) and whose own past becomes a novel littered with literary references. From Maurice's resemblance to Byron (528), to Onorina being a possible retrospective model for Michelangelo (529), and to the aforementioned reference to the keepsake, the characters both repeat and have repeated a cherished common language: thus the Count visits Honorine's companion, Mme Gobain, to hear a recitation of “les moindres mots qu'elle a dits, car une seule exclamation peut me livrer les secrets de cette âme” (557). In a further homology between language and sexuality, they are both private and public, both unique métaphores vives and clichés, both the faithful wife and the adulteress. It seems inevitable, then, that Honorine should circulate, either as herself, her flowers, Onorina, or Maurice's story.

Given the temptation and fear of publicity, it is interesting that Maurice should make his revelations in the stage-like setting of Genoa, as befits the actor manqué. Honorine, too, is something of an actress, being “une comédienne de bonne foi” (570, see 593) who herself admits: “Je suis comédienne avec mon âme” (594). Here, too, then, the public invades and infects the most private and most inviolable of languages—the feminine, the sentimental, and the religious. Not only priests but their language—that of sincerity, loyalty, and piety—are neither sacred nor profane, but between discourses. As Pierre Larthomas has shown in an analysis of angelic vocabulary in Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan: “religion et théâtre se rejoignent.”⁴⁶ Or as Frank Paul Bowman writes of Balzac: “religious metaphor does not function essentially in an ideological way, but rather serves as an index of various registers of imitated speech.”⁴⁷

This contamination of private by public, and religious by profane, has important implications for a reading of Honorine. In showing that Honorine's private language is irredeemably contaminated by public discourses, whether eighteenth-century lasciviousness or 1820s views on marriage, Balzac's text, as Roddey Reid has shown of Les Paysans, “refuses … to indulge in its utopian impulse”⁴⁸ and (simply) sublimate a sublime Honorine. This invasion of private discourses shows that public morality and the integrity of the family can only be maintained by a mixture of subterfuge, persuasion, and even violence. For the incompatibility between the private and public meanings of such terms as sincerity, loyalty, and purity, can only be eliminated if female sexuality is also elided, stigmatized, and finally killed. For Honorine, therefore, as for Les Paysans: “There is no escape … from the contradictions of the novel's familialism.”⁴⁹

The contradictions in Honorine the woman and in Honorine the novel are compounded by the form of the narrative itself. On the one hand Maurice exposes Honorine's inner conflicts and thereby gives her story unwanted and unnecessary publicity. On the other hand, he turns her into a story, into a woman who, out of a mixture of self-protection and self-fulfillment, becomes her own private language, her own work of art. In thus simultaneously enhancing both Honorine's public and private personas, Maurice's narrative exacerbates the tension between the two. Rather than making Honorine's conflicts less acute or more resolvable with hindsight, his narrative increases their intensity. Exposure is precisely what she feared most and Maurice gives her posthumous celebrity. In this way Balzac's text, while thrusting Honorine into the past, shows that the double bind she found herself in may well apply just as much, if not more, to future times and to future women.

At the same time it must also be pointed out that Honorine, like Le Lys dans la vallée for Gabrielle Malandain, is “un véritable montage de textes.”⁵⁰ Maurice's monologue is both completed and undermined by Balzac's own méta-métarécit, the letters of Honorine and Octave, and by the reactions of Léon de Lora, Claude Vignon, and Camille Maupin. Honorine's multiplicity of voices subverts both the authority of the single author, whether Balzac or Maurice, and the power of “the institutional organization of language” noted by Jane Nicholson in Le Cousin Pons,⁵¹ and source of such anguish for Honorine. Neither individual nor group has, therefore, ultimate power and they are all, whether they like it or not, between categories, categories themselves deconstructed as they are constructed. By using Maurice as an agent of shift between these categories, characters, himself and his œuvre, Balzac opens up new spaces, new times, new sexuality, and new language.⁵²

Notes

1. de Bauvan. His surname does not, however, appear in Honorine (see Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1976] 2: 1417). Page references to the text of Honorine (2: 525-97) will be given after the relevant quotation. References to other works by Balzac will be from the same edition. On Maurice's surname, see below n. 23.

2. The opening and closing dialogues are later additions: see Pierre Citron's introduction, 2: 508, 517, 519 and 1440 note.

3. The themes of proscription and separation are pervasive in Balzac. For references to proscription, see for example Per Nykrog, La Pensée de Balzac dans “la Comédie humaine” (Copenhague: Munksgaard, 1965) 171, and to separation, Nicole Mozet, Balzac au pluriel (Paris: PUF, 1990) 9: “l'écriture balzacienne, par rapport à la Passion aussi bien qu'au Moi ou à l'Histoire, est une écriture de la séparation.” Honorine, then, is the story of “une restauration/une restitution manquée”: see Mozet, 49, 52 and Owen N. Heathcote, “History, narrative position, and the subject in Balzac: the example of La Paix du ménage” in Ideology and religion in French Literature: Essays in honour of Brian Juden, ed. Harry Cockerham and Esther Ehrman (Camberley, Surrey: Porphyrogenitus, 1989) 181-99.

4. Franc Schuerewegen, “Pour effleurer le sexe. A propos d'Honorine de Balzac,” Studia Neophilologica 55 (1983): 193, 193-197.

5. Such a view of male time and female time may, however, be seen to go against the grain of current thinking on gender and sexuality. I would like to thank Eileen Boyd Sivert for drawing this to my attention.

6. For an examination of difference as it is developed in this paper, see Robert Young, “The same difference,” Screen 28.3 (1987): 84-91. On p. 88, for example, Young writes: “It is only the other that makes the same the same.”

7. Balzac's views of England and the English are, of course, too complex to be examined fully here. For other examples of his hostility see, however, M. Le Yaouanc's introduction to Le Lys dans la vallée (Paris: Garnier, 1966) lv-lvii.

8. For an appraisal of movement and resistance with particular reference to Louis Lambert, see Nykrog 139-152.

9. The guests at the exclusive, late-night dinner-party “oasis” (526) are on the terrace of a villa overlooking city and sea. In Béatrix Camille Maupin inhabits a similar “oasis” in the semi-island that is Guérande/Le Croisic (2: 701-02). Such narrative-inducing dinner-parties are, of course, favored by Balzac (La Muse du département, L'Auberge rouge) and another, in Autre étude de femme, is hosted by Camille Maupin/Félicité des Touches: “Le salon de Mlle des Touches, célèbre d'ailleurs à Paris, est le dernier asile où se soit réfugié l'esprit français d'autrefois, avec sa profondeur cachée, ses mille détours et sa politesse exquise.” (3: 674).

10. The inaccessible (Parisian) retreat is another leitmotiv in Balzac, notably in La Fille aux yeux d'or. For a study of the “closed form” in Balzac, with particular reference to the Histoire des Treize, see John R. O'Connor, Balzac's Soluble Fish (Madrid: Studia Humanitatis, 1977) 39-110.

11. See Christopher Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama (London: Arnold, 1978) 116-17.

12. Although it could be said that Maurice merely joins the group “in the know,” Octave himself is certainly devastated by this betrayal of confidence in the presence of Maurice and the two priests (548).

13. Franc Schuerewegen, “Pour effleurer le sexe,” analyzes the suggestiveness of the floral excess in Honorine.

14. 9: 970. The disparities between “real” and “utopian” work in Balzac, and their implications for writing and reading, are discussed by Pierre Barbéris, “Dialectique du prince et du marchand,” in Balzac: l'invention du roman, eds. Claude Duchet and Jacques Neefs (Paris: Belfond, 1982) 181-212. See also Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990, 124): “C'est au XIXe siècle qu'une forme-Homme surgit, parce que les forces de l'homme se composent avec d'autres forces de finitude, découvertes dans la vie, le travail, le langage.”

15. See Schuerewegen 195.

16. The different allegiances of Balzac's priests are analyzed in Donald Adamson, “The priest in Balzac's fiction: secular and sacred aspects of the Church,” in Ideology and religion in French Literature, 1-22.

17. Of La Peau de chagrin in the letter to Montalembert (Correspondance, (Paris: Garnier, 1960) 1: 567. See Pléiade, 10: 23 and Pierre Laubriet, L'lntelligence de l'art chez Balzac (Paris: Didier, 1961) 52, 55. For a reference to the femme écran see La Fille aux yeux d'or, Pléiade, 5: 1095. For the internal Balzacian reader seen as spy or as parasite, see Franc Schuerewegen, Balzac contre Balzac (Toronto: Paratexte; Paris: CDU.-SEDES, 1990) 157-62.

18. One of the revealing inconsistencies in the chronology of Honorine: see Pléiade, 2: 1440.

19. As Proust has shown, Balzac's internal audiences are usually more indulgent (Contre Sainte-Beuve [Paris: Gallimard, 1954] 250-54.) Schuerewegen, Balzac contre Balzac, offers interesting analyses of the interplay between Balzac's internal readers and alternative readings of his texts.

20. See Citron's introduction 2: 513 and 1423, note.

21. Again the novel's chronology is uncertain.

22. La Vie élégante ou la formation du Tout-Paris 1815-1848 (Paris: Fayard, 1990) 107.

23. He is referred to as M. de l'Hostal at the end of the story. It is tempting to see this name as an echo of his role of host/(guest) and, therefore, like the critic for J. Hillis Miller, both/neither within nor without the narrative (“The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al., [London: Routledge, 1979] 217-53). See also Dorothy Kelly, Fictional Genders: Role and Representation in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Lincoln: Nebraska Univ. Press, 1989) 103.

24. Maurice does, however, refer to “tous ses quartiers de noblesse” (563-64). Other ambiguously placed “pupilles” include Ursule Mirouët, and Juana (Les Marana).

25. Camille Maupin's final retreat into a convent may also be indebted to Sand's “rêve monastique”: see Madeleine Fargeaud's introduction to Béatrix 2: 608.

26. Louis Lambert 11: 691.

27. Louis Lambert 11: 622 and the Dédicace to Les Parents pauvres 7: 54. The double in Balzac has, of course, been frequently analyzed. See, for example: Rose Fortassier, “Balzac et le démon du double dans Le père Goriot,” L'Année balzacienne, 1986, 155-67.

28. 1: 380.

29. Béatrix 2: 677. She is also “une sorte de Don Juan femelle” (698-99).

30. Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988) 55.

31. Un prince de la bohème 7: 821. See also La Fille aux yeux d'or: “L'amour vrai règne surtout par la mémoire” (5: 1093).

32. Honorine's “attente sans objet” (571) may echo the waiting and the longing of the “grande ombre” Honorino in Les Proscrits (11: 551-52).

33. Petrey 55.

34. The persistence of death in Honorine has already been noted by Pierre Danger, L'Eros balzacien (Paris: Corti, 1989) 51-52. If Honorine, like Le Colonel Chabert, “est l'histoire de la construction et de la destruction d'un sujet” (Marcelle Marini, “Chabert mort ou vif,” Littérature, no. 13 [1974]: 95, 92-112), it is significant that in Honorine, as in Adieu, the subject in process is a woman: “from the very beginning the woman in this text stands out as a problem,” and that for Octave, too, the woman's cure is in the man's reason. (See Shoshana Felman, “Women and madness: the critical phallacy,” Diacritics, no. 5 (1975): 6, 8, 2-10 and, for Octave's fear of madness, Honorine 558). It is, therefore, possible to see Honorine, as Diana Knight sees La Cousine Bette, as betraying “male fear of women's refusal of sexual response” (“Reading as an old maid: La Cousine Bette and compulsory heterosexuality,” Quinquereme [1989]: 72, 67-79). As Honorine writes to Maurice: “je ne puis pas aimer le comte. Tout est là, voyez-vous?” (581). See also Kelly 75-117.

35. Honorine becomes (conveniently) allegorized as “la Pudeur instruite” (584).

36. “Balzac's A Daughter of Eve and the apple of knowledge” in Sexuality and Subordination, eds. Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (London: Routledge, 1989) 56, 25-59.

37. Ward Jouve 57.

38. Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974) 48.

39. Kelly 114. It can, however, be argued that Balzac's text, and this study, underscores Maurice's desire for Honorine, turning that into another non-dit. I am grateful to Armine Kotin Mortimer for this observation.

40. Citron, Introduction 523.

41. Avec Balzac (Paris: Gallimard, 1937) 19.

42. 1: 840.

43. At the same time, wit is a dangerous weapon: see David Bell, “Epigrams and Ministerial Eloquence: the War of Words in Balzac's La Peau de chagrin,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 15.3 (1987): 258, 252-64.

44. For a discussion of initiation into “a high social jurisprudence” in Balzac, see Peter Brooks, “Balzac: Representation and Signification,” in his The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976) 130-131, 110-52. Such an initiation is often conducted by women whose ability to combine lucidity and sentiment makes them into “docteurs en corset” (1: 346) or even “Machiavels en jupon” (7: 188). The most sustained example of this combination of the maternal, the political, and the literary, is no doubt Henriette de Mortsauf's celebrated letter to Félix de Vandenesse (9: 1084-97) but Camille Maupin herself combines these qualities in her behavior to Calyste in Béatrix. See Arlette Michel, “Balzac juge du féminisme,” L'Année balzacienne, 1973, 191-93, 183-200.

45. 9: 915. A questionable assertion for Balzac, but neatly linking language and sexuality. The fact that Honorine's sexual relations with Octave, within marriage, are seen as a form of prostitution (578), even rape (579), may explain why Pierre Citron sees Honorine as illustrating Balzac's habit of making prostitutes “mal mariées” (Introduction to Les Marana 10: 1026) and echoes his comment that, for Balzac, “le mariage occidental est la prostitution” (“Le rêve asiatique de Balzac,” L'Année balzacienne, 1968, 313, 303-36). The oriental theme in Honorine does, moreover, confirm links between space, language, flowers, and sexuality: “Si les Parisiennes avaient un peu du génie que l'esclavage du harem exige chez les femmes de l'Orient, elles donneraient tout un langage aux fleurs posées sur leur tête.” (568. See 570, 574).

46. Sur une image de Balzac,” L'Année balzacienne, 1973, 310, 301-26.

47. “The Future of Studies on Romanticism: A Personal View,” Romance Quarterly 34 (1987): 474-75, 471-80.

48. “Realism Revisited: Familial Discourse and Narrative in Balzac's Les Paysans,” Modern Language Notes 103 (1988): 879, 865-86.

49. Reid 881.

50. “Dire la passion, écrire Le Lys dans la vallée,” Romantisme, no. 62 (1988): 31, 31-39. See also Michaël Lastinger, “Narration et ‘point de vue’ dans deux romans de Balzac: La Peau de chagrin et Le Lys dans la vallée,” L'Année balzzacienne, 1988, 290, 271-90.

51. “Discourse, power, and necessity: contextualizing Le Cousin Pons,” Symposium 42 (1988): 54, 48-61.

52. I would like to thank Maggie Allison for her comments and suggestions on various sections of this paper. An earlier version was presented at the 16th Colloquium in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, University of Oklahoma, 1990.