Balzac's "La Maison Nucingen": A Few Thoughts

Balzac's "La Maison Nucingen"--literally "The House of Nucingen," though perhaps more fittingly translated as "The Firm of Nucingen"--consists of a long dialogue among a group of men about time over a meal in a restaurant overheard by another diner. In that dialogue one of the party tells the others how it was that that major figure of Balzac's "Human Comedy," Eugène de Rastignac, made his fortune, bridging the gap between the condition we find him in in Le Père Goriot (Father Goriot), and the position we find him in in later works like Illusions Perdues (Lost Illusions), where he is an established figure in Parisian society and eventually one of the most prominent men in all of France.

Not what I expected given the craftsmanship Balzac showed in prior works, it is also the case that the dialogue is rather maundering, to the point of Balzac himself making excuses for it--the storyteller's dining companions actually getting impatient and themselves accusing him of maundering, and he dismissing their objections repeatedly. (As the man telling the story remarks of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, "the most wooden-headed playwright would give you the whole . . . in a single act," Richardson's literary accomplishment the production of "fourteen volumes of her" from the material.)

I did not find the answer particularly satisfying, the novella trying my patience in a way Balzac rarely does. Still, the story's events are too important for someone really interested in this corner of Balzac's saga to skip over, and the interest of the tale does pick up as it moves along, because we move from more marginal figures and events to those at the heart of the story, and because of Balzac's memorable portrait of the financial world where the action happens, the chicaneries and treacheries of which never lost their relevance given, to use the phrase of another Victorian novelist who told tales of the financial world, "the way we live now."