A passion in the desert

LA COMEDIE HUMAINE – Honoré de Balzac XIIIe volume des œuvres complètes de H. DE BALZAC by Veuve André HOUSSIAUX, éditeur, Hébert et Cie, Successeurs, 7, rue Perronet, 7 – Paris (1877)

Scenes from military life  

A PASSION IN THE DESERT          

Analysis of the work Included in this volume are a short story from the Scènes de la vie militaire, Une passion dans le désert , and one of Balzac’s most important novels, the unfortunately unfinished Les Paysans, part of the Scènes de la vie de campagne. These two major divisions of La Comédie Humaine were intended, along with the Scènes de la vie politique, to complete the descriptive fresco of the Etudes de mœurs au XIXe siècle. Une passion dans le désert is a short story Balzac published in December 1830 in the newly founded Revue de Paris. The success of Physiologie du mariage had just put Balzac’s name on the map after several years of tribulation and obscurity. Balzac exploited this initial success by publishing some of the short stories that make up the first series of Scènes de la vie privée. Almost immediately, he was approached by some of the elegant magazines of the literary “new wave”: La Mode, La Silhouette, and finally the Revue de Paris. One of his main introducers into this group was his friend Victor Ratier, a publicist who is little known today, but who was very popular at the time. For several months, he was Balzac’s advisor and even collaborator on several of his short stories. According to an indication by Laure Surville in the little book she wrote about her brother, the subject ofUne passion dans le désert was supplied to Balzac by Victor Ratier. This indication is confirmed by a very detailed letter from Victor Ratier in 1861. The story was told to Victor Ratier by the trainer Martin, owner of a famous menagerie in Paris, at the end of 1829. Balzac’s short story of the friendship between a panther and a soldier lost in the desert seems to be one of those “oddities” to which Balzac devoted his first tales of the Revue de Paris since the news that followed was Sarrasine and Farewell both of which describe exceptional situations. A Passion in the Desert is the last of the Scenes from Military Life. Next came a new division of La Comédie Humaine, the Scènes de la vie de campagne, at the head of which Balzac placed a work he had long been working on, Les Paysans.

The story Une passion dans le désert is a short story by Balzac published as a novel in 1837 by Delloye et Lecou in volume XVI of Etudes philosophiques. The Battle of the Pyramids serves as the starting point for the story, which continues during the Upper Egyptian Expedition. “Episode of an epic that could be called The French in Egypt (…). During General Desaix’s expedition to Upper Egypt, a soldier who had fallen into the hands of the Maugrabins (sic) was taken by these Arabs beyond the cataracts of the Nile. At the time, Bonaparte was touring Egypt. A soldier lost in the desert finds refuge in a cave and manages to tame a black panther, with whom he is somewhat enamored. But a sudden gesture gives him the impression that the animal is about to devour him, and he stabs her. He realized too late that it was a sign of affection from the animal. The soldier himself recounts his adventure to his companion. He called the panther Mignonne and projected a host of feminine qualities that he still remembers fondly.

1) Source analysis: Preface from the ^20th volume of La Comédie Humaine published by France Loisirs in 1987, based on the full text published under the auspices of the Société des Amis d’Honoré de Balzac, 45, rue de l’Abbé-Grégoire – 75006 Paris.

2) Source story: Wikipedia, the universal encyclopedia.