A Note on Balzac's The Two Brothers

Reading Lucien de Rubempre's story in Balzac's Lost Illusions I felt that, Jack London's Martin Eden apart, it was the truest portrait of what the young artist faces as he embarks upon a career.

If less impressive on that score there is nonetheless a comparable bit of that of truth in Balzac's other novel, The Two Brothers. There Joseph Bridau, a young artist of talent and application is looked down upon as an addle-brained youth of no prospects because of his career choice by virtually everyone, and a constant worry to his conventionally-minded mother--even as Joseph, because of his work as a painter, and his loyal and responsible personal conduct, is her and the family's sole support (his earnings not from a "day job," but from his painting itself, what enable them to survive financially). The lack of appreciation for what he does, and her lack of appreciation for Joseph because he does it, is accentuated by the contrast between the way his mother looks at him and the favored, elder son, Philippe, a creature of monstrous selfishness, callousness and irresponsibility who, after a superficially "brilliant" career as a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars, brings nothing but calamity to his family, and to anyone else unfortunate enough to be associated with him, in spite of which he remains the favorite, but ever remains the more admired and looked-to for "great things." (All this is even more the case when they venture out to the mother's provincial home town of Issodun.)

It is only as the end of the story draws near, and their mother approaches the end of a life constantly darkened and ultimately shortened by Philippe's betrayals, that she is induced--by her confessor--to recognize that if there has been a sin in her life it has been her not loving and appreciating Joseph. In the years after Philippe, whose ambitions have ultimately been wrecked by his own indiscretion (and the all too contemporary-seeming financial idiocy-cum-madness which looms so large in his, and others', tales of the Paris of that era), dies in a colonial campaign, and leaves what remain of his fortune and title to Joseph, who at the end of the story is not only a great success as an artist, but wealthy and literally ennobled (the painter a Comte, no less).

Considering Joseph's trajectory, which could not be more different from Lucien's, I had an impression of Balzac writing a wish-fulfillment here. I suppose it is a reminder that even so cold-eyed a realist as Balzac could be—so much so as has put many a reader off of him from his own time to today (Dickens acknowledging the fact, more recently even David Walsh allowing that "Balzac's relentless, ferocious assault on this environment and its denizens can at times be wearing")--even he could, occasionally, allow at least one of his characters a good outcome.