The Elixir of Long Life

THE HUMAN COMEDY – Honoré de Balzac XVth volume of works of Honoré de Balzac edited by widow André Houssiaux, publisher, Hebert and Co, successors, 7 rue Perronet – Paris (1874) Philosophical studies

THE ELIXIR OF LONG LIFE (1830)

Work dedicated by Honoré de Balzac TO THE READER Early in the author’s literary life, a friend, long dead, gave him the subject of this study, which he later found in a collection published towards the beginning of this century; and, according to his conjectures, it is a fantasy due to Hoffmann of Berlin, published in some almanac from Germany, and overlooked in his works by the publishers. The Human Comedy is rich enough in inventions for the author to admit to an innocent borrowing; like the good La Fontaine, he will have treated in his own way, and without knowing it, a fact already told. This was not one of those jokes fashionable in 1830, a time when every author did something atrocious for the pleasure of young girls. When you’ve arrived at the elegant parricide of Don Juan, try to guess the conduct that would be held, in roughly similar conjectures, by honest people who, in the nineteenth century, take money in life annuities, on the faith of a catarrh, or those who rent a house to an old woman for the rest of her days? Would they resurrect their rentiers? I’d like to see weighmen of conscience examine the degree of similarity between Don Juan and fathers who marry their children because of expectations? Does human society, which, to hear some philosophers tell it, is on the road to progress, consider the art of waiting for death to be a step in the right direction? This science has created honourable professions, through which we make a living from death. Some people’s state is to hope for a death, they brood over it, they squat over a corpse every morning, and make a pillow of it at night: these are the coadjutors, the cardinals, the supernumeraries, the tontiniers, and so on. Add to this many delicate people, eager to buy a property whose price is beyond their means, but who logically and coldly establish the life chances remaining to their fathers or mothers-in-law, octogenarians or septuagenarians, by saying: “Before three years, I will necessarily inherit, and then…”. A murderer disgusts us less than a spy. The murderer may have given in to a fit of madness, but he can repent and ennoble himself. But the spy is always a spy; he’s a spy in bed, at the table, walking, at night, during the day; he’s vile at every minute. What would it be like to be a murderer like a spy is vile? Well, haven’t you just recognized a new type of company crowd of beings led by our laws, by our mores, by our customs, to think ceaselessly of the death of their own, to covet it? They weigh up what a coffin is worth by haggling over cashmeres for their wives, climbing the stairs of a theater, wishing to go to the Bouffons, wishing for a carriage. They murder when dear creatures, ravishing with innocence, bring them childlike foreheads to kiss in the evening, saying: “Good evening, Father! They see at all hours eyes they would like to close, and which reopen every morning in the light, like Belvidéro’s in this Study. God only knows how many parricides are committed by thought! Imagine a man who has to pay a thousand écus in life annuities to an old woman, and who both live in the country, separated by a brook, but strangers enough to each other to be able to hate each other cordially without breaching those human proprieties that put a mask on the face of two brothers, one of whom will have the majorate, and the other a legitimate one. The whole of European civilization rests on HEREDITY as on a pivot, and it would be madness to do away with it; but could we not, as in the machines that are the pride of our Age, perfect this essential cog? If the author has retained this old formula TO THE READER in a work in which he endeavors to represent all literary forms, it is to place a remark relating to some Studies, and especially to this one. Each of his compositions is based on ideas of varying degrees of novelty, whose expression he finds useful. He may give priority to certain forms, certain thoughts that have since passed into the literary realm and sometimes become popularized there. The dates of the The original publication of each Study should therefore not be a matter of indifference to those readers who wish to do it justice. Reading gives us unknown friends, and what a friend a reader can be! We have known friends who read nothing of ours! the author hopes to have paid his debt by dedicating this work DIIS IGNOTIS.

Analysis of the work The short story L’Elixir de longue vie (The Elixir of Long Life), published in the Revue de Paris in October 1830, takes us to an entirely different point in Balzac’s career. The date is not irrelevant. It was Balzac’s first article in the Revue de Paris, an aristocratic publication open only to “established” writers. This promotion deserved an effort: it had to shine. And Balzac did indeed “shine” to meet expectations. He shone with invention, he shone with style. He presented himself in a “suit of lights” in this distinguished arena of literary news. It feels a little too much. To begin with, being unsure of himself, he borrows the subject. Fantasy tales were all the rage at the time. Balzac was tempted by this beverage since, at the same time, he was writing the two tales, Zéro and La Danse des pierres, which would be brought together in L’Eglise. For L’Elixir de longue vie, Balzac drew the argument “from a collection published towards the beginning of this century”, according to his own admission in the notice to the reader that he later placed at the head of his story. Investigations by the Balzacians completed this indication by discovering that it was a tale entitled L’Elixir d’immortalité (The Elixir of Immortality ), which had in fact appeared in 1805, without an author’s name, in a collective collection entitled L’Almanach du prosateur (The Prosecutor’s Almanac). This tale, of which Balzac took up the main incidents, was itself no more than the summary of a short story that the English pamphleteer Bernard Steele, a collaborator of Addison, had published in 1715 in the Spectator under the title Histoire de Valentin, fameux chimiste allemand et du secret qu’il avait trouvé, etc. This anecdote is a little different from Balzac’s tale: an old scientist who had found the elixir of immortality hands it over to a dizzy son who is slow to do his duty and resigns himself to using the precious liqueur for his own benefit: but when the latter dies, his resurrection so overwhelms his son, this time obedient and faithful, that the bottle escapes him and breaks before the operation is completed. Balzac changed the character of the tale and made it more atrocious by turning the deliberate detour of the elixir into a premeditated murder, and by attributing this parricide to Don Juan Tenorio, the notorious braggart whose cynicism and impiety Tirso de Molina, and after him Molière, had made the image of. Balzac thought it essential to add to the horror by placing the father’s agony during an orgy scene, by multiplying the sinister details that made the father’s death a monstrous scene, and finally, at the denouement of the tale, by inventing a macabre scene that combined this self-indulgent painting of cynicism with profanation and derision. This boisterous provocation was intended, of course, to distinguish the new contributor to the Revue de Paris from many other incendiaries. To leave nothing to chance, Balzac had embellished his style with all the glitter, puffery and guipure that could dazzle the reader. Reading these overly elegant, overly shimmering sentences, we understand the epithets with which Sainte-Beuve defined Balzac’s style at the time, calling it “fetid and putrid, spiritual, rotten, illuminated, papilloté and marvelous in its way…of stringing imperceptible pearls and making them ring with a clatter of atoms”. This definition, surprising for readers ofEugénie Grandet and La Femme abandonnée, is a fairly accurate characterization of the young “upstart” of 1830, softened but not completely by success. These efforts to be sparkling did not, however, make Balzac’s Don Juan an unforgettable character. Conventional, musky and provocative all at once, it’s nothing more than a colourful, superficial image of cynicism. Balzac’s Don Juan,” admits René Guise, “doesn’t figure very highly in the line of literary Don Juans. As for the social or philosophical significance of the short story, it really takes an extreme indulgence to accept its classification in the Philosophical studies by means of the amphigoric explanation that Balzac had Felix Davin give: “See how in Elixir of long life the idea of heredity becomes murderous in its turn, and how sharp is the dagger it puts in children’s hands. “The “idea of heredity” has nothing to do with it, and Balzac does a poor job of justifying a filler that Etudes philosophiques could have done without. Completed by the author in Paris, October 1830.

The Elixir of Long Life is a fantastic tale by Honoré de Balzac. This version of the Don Juan myth appeared in pre-publication in the Revue de Paris, in 1830, under the title Festin et Fin, then in 1846 in the Furne edition. It appears in Etudes philosophiques. One of the first texts to bear the author’s name, Honoré de Balzac, this version of the Don Juan myth is one of the least known to the general public, as Bernard Guyon regrets. The text seems to be artificially linked to the Etudes philosophiques by a somewhat clichéd “notice to the reader”. The influence of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann and his Devil’s Elixirs, which Balzac must have read, is clearly visible.

The Story The story takes place in a palace in Ferrara: the young Don Juan and the prince of the House of Este are gathered for a feast, accompanied by seven pretty young courtesans. As they chat, Don Juan complains to his companion about the longevity of his father, Bartholomew Belvidero, a wealthy nonagenarian who has always allowed him to live in great luxury, without ever forbidding him anything. When they are interrupted to warn the young man that the old man is dying, Don Juan goes to his father’s bedside, who then reveals that he is in possession of a vial containing a liquid that will bring him back to life. To do this, however, he needs the help of his son, who must rub him all over after his death. Faced with his father’s corpse, Don Juan is unable to comply with his father’s last wish. As a result, the servants begin embalming the body. That evening, Don Juan decides to soak his father’s eye in elixir, which immediately comes back to life. Stunned by the action of this mysterious liquid, Don Juan decides to gouge out his father’s eye, thus committing parricide. So as not to arouse suspicion, he buried his father with all due pomp and circumstance, and had a majestic statue placed on the deceased’s grave. Don Juan becomes wealthy and truly powerful, so he can freely indulge in the pleasures of life and conquer the highest society. He became very popular with society and even with the Pope, and kept the vial all his life to ensure his own resurrection. When he, in turn, becomes an old and vulnerable man, he retires to a castle not far from the town of San Lucar and marries a devoted and gracious young Andalusian woman named Done Elvire. Unlike his father, Don Juan’s son Philippe Belvidéro is virtuous and pious. He and Done Elvire take care of the old man until his last day, not out of love for him but to earn as much money as possible. Don Juan, feeling death approaching, summons his son and asks him, in turn, for the same favor as his father years before, but without revealing the virtues of the vial’s contents. Philippe carried out his father’s instructions, gradually bringing his face to life, then his right arm, with which he strangled the young man, who dropped the vial, letting the precious liquid escape. Within moments, a crowd had gathered around the body of the old man, who had regained his youthful face. All the ecclesiastics and other witnesses decide to canonize Don Juan. At his funeral, Don Juan utters blasphemous insults and the resurrected head kills an abbot by detaching itself from the body. The story ends with a murderous, satanic funeral. This is not his only peculiarity, as the author intervenes twice in the story; first in the introduction, after the parricide, and then, at the end, when he begins a reflection on what he himself calls a myth, but which he leaves to the reader to do himself.

The characters Bartholomeo Belvidéro: 15th-century Italian noble family, including Bartholomeo, his wife Juana, their son Don Juan, daughter-in-law Elvire and grandson Philippe.  

1) Source analysis: Preface from the ^25th 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 notes and topics :Wikipedia.

3) Character genealogy source: Félicien Marceau “Balzac et son monde – Gallimard”.