Balzac's Vautrin, the Making of Fortunes, and the Dream of Becoming a Celebrity

It was Thomas Piketty's discussion of the novels of Balzac in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that persuaded me his Human Comedy was worth my while--and having read through a fair portion of at least the more oft-cited of the books belonging to it I have only felt more and more with time that the impression was correct.

Perhaps the most striking part of Piketty's discussion of the works was his reference to the dialogue in Father Goriot between the arch-criminal Vautrin and law student Eugene de Rastignac regarding how one really acquires wealth in this profoundly unequal and profoundly unjust world. For all the pious bourgeois prattle the road to riches is not "hard work," even for a learned man of the professions such as de Rastignac is in school to become. For all the drudgery of the work and the indignities one must suffer year after year, decade after decade ("I would sooner turn pirate on the high seas than have my soul shrivel up inside me like that" Vautrin says of himself), even for the very few who rise high in it ("there are but twenty Procureurs Generaux . . . in all France," but "twenty thousand of you young men who aspire to that elevated position," such that they "must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot"), the rewards of such a professional life are apt to be paltry by the standard of anything that could really be called luxury (Vautrin challenging Rastignac to find even "five advocates" in all of "Paris who by the time that they are fifty are making fifty thousand francs a year").

Balzac, and Vautrin, are prepared to allow that "brilliant genius" may stand a chance--but in the absence of that rather unlikely path "skilful corruption" is the only alternative, the more in as one hopes to make their fortune quickly, as Vautrin tells de Rastignac in softening him up for a thoroughly criminal "offer that no one would decline," in Vautrin's words.

Desperate as his circumstances may be de Rastignac does "decline" that offer, and it is off to jail for Vautrin--while de Rastignac ends up making his way to fortune and power and fame by other means no more flattering to conventional attitudes about work and wealth, confirming rather than refuting what Vautrin has to say.

Considering that--the way that the rewards of even a respectable professional career are a matter of long and painful effort, highly uncertain, and in the event that one does attain them, pretty paltry--I find myself thinking again of a different writer who was not at all friendly toward Balzac, Upton Sinclair, and what he had to say in Money Writes! about the quest after celebrity already recognizable in his day. The odds of actually attaining celebrity are not high--but all the same, for most people it looks likelier than a conventional "career" (and those who embark upon it at least hope to make a success this way without committing a crime).