The Outcasts

THE HUMAN COMEDY – Honoré de Balzac XVIth volume of works of Honoré de Balzac edited by widow André Houssiaux, publisher, Hebert and Co, successors, 7 rue Perronet – Paris (1877)

Philosophical studies

THE OUTCASTS (1831)

Analysis of the work The story was published in the Revue de Paris in May 1831. Balzac had made great strides in just a few months, his reputation as a storyteller was well established, and his signature was sought after. He wrote a lot, and announced even more, with plans for his Scenes from Private Life, his Novels and Philosophical Tales, his “Women’s Studies” and his “Military Scenes”. This abundant output forced him to work quickly. Les Proscrits, a 14th-century tale featuring Dante and one of his companions in exile, is a less solid, less original reconstruction of the Paris of yesteryear than that of the time of Catherine de Médicis. Nor did Balzac take much trouble to invent his plot. Two eminent Balzacians, Pierre-Georges Castex and René Guise, have noted a few signs of haste in the story, and do not regard Les Proscrits as one of Balzac’s most perfect short stories. If we compare Les Proscrits with his other short stories, we can indeed agree with their judgment. But Balzac’s opinion seems to have been different, since he later joined Les Proscrits to two of his favorite works, Louis Lambert and Séraphita , to form a whole that he isolated from his other Etudes philosophiques , presenting it in 1835 under the title Le Livre mystique. Should we bow to this promotion of the Outcasts ? For the presentation of his works, Balzac invented so many ingenious combinations designed to turn contracts or coin money that it is sometimes difficult to decide whether some of his classifications are justified by the significance of the work or by commercial expediency. He wrote for his Livre mystique a somewhat disappointing preface, which is mainly devoted to Louis Lambert and Séraphita, and does not add much to what an attentive reader could gain from reading Louis Lambert et de Séraphita. Les Proscrits is mentioned in this preface only in a modest phrase: “Les Proscrits,” says Balzac, “is the peristyle of the edifice”, and he explains: “there, the idea appears in the Middle Ages in its naive triumph. Louis Lambert is mysticism caught in the act, the Seer merchant to his vision…Seraphita is mysticism held to be true, personified”. These sentences aren’t very clear. What we can conclude from this is that Les Proscrits is merely an overture, a presentation. Presentation of what? Balzac traces this beautiful interpretation of Christianity back to St. Paul and St. John, which was, he says, “the doctrine of the first Christians”, the “religion of the desert anchorites”, “an ark thrown between Christian mysticism and Indian mysticism”, “coming from Asia”, transmitted by Memphis, by the initiates of Eleusis and Delphi, by Pythagoras, taken up again by St. John, and finally “transmitted nebulously to the University of Paris”. This is the itinerary that leads, on the banks of the Seine, to Sigier de Brabant’s masterly lesson, presented in the presence of Dante, to four pages of Les Proscrits , which legitimize the place Balzac gives to this short story. And it is, in fact, this exposition of the plan of Creation that is an indispensable preliminary to understanding the applications that Balzac will show in Louis Lambert and Séraphita. Sigier describes a unitary organization that explains the correspondences that Louis Lambert will use to read all things; this new reading of Creation will provide Balzac’s angelic androgyne, Seraphitus-Seraphita, with the supra-reality in which he moves and lives, and which for him is the true reality. In this sense, these four pages of Les Proscrits are an important introduction to Louis Lambert and Séraphita.

Sigier’s entire doctrine, which Balzac calls his “mysticism”, can be summed up in two propositions set out at the beginning of his presentation. Principle: “intelligences (by which we mean both life and sensibility) are arranged in great spheres on the plane of nature: there is “a gradation of spirituality” between “the sphere where the least intelligence shines” and “the most translucent where souls see the way to God”. Consequence: “Spirits belonging to the same sphere get along fraternally in soul, in flesh, in thought.” This key to dreams explains “the phenomena of love, instinctive repulsions, vivid attractions that ignore the laws of space, sudden cohesions of souls that seem to recognize each other”. This explanation of the organization of the Universe is an integral part of Louis Lambert ‘s work. The rest of the speech is a fine-tuning of this telescope to see the invisible. Life and sensitivity, still dormant in minerals, gradually manifest themselves in the plant and animal kingdoms, in the successive sketches of lichens, stone-like mosses, infusoria and microscopic organisms showing the first signs of movement, right up to mammals and man. But it doesn’t stop there. And circles of life and spirituality that our senses don’t reach form another gradation of which man is the crudest test, and which the hierarchy of angels completes by the same degrees that exist between mineral creations and man, thus forming an immense planisphere of creation traversed by unknown links and waves that escape us. A cryptic phrase summed up this infusion of life through the various layers of creation, giving special meaning to the Verbum factum is from Genesis: “According to him, the Word nourished the Word spiritual, the Word spirituality nourished the Word animated, the Word nourished the Word animal, the animal Word nourished the vegetable Word, and the vegetable Word expressed the life of the sterileWord…(Thus) Dr. Sigier built a spiritual world whose gradually elevated spheres separated us from God, just as the plant was separated from us by an infinity of circles to be crossed. “And he concluded by quoting St. Paul’s words, “In Deo vivimus, movemus et sumus.” This reconciliation of Buddhist pantheism and the Christianity of the mystics is one of the keys to this mystical book, of which Louis Lambert and Seraphita will be the living demonstration. It explains the rightful place Balzac claimed for Les Proscrits. The last word of the story, enigmatic because it is ill-prepared, is a reminder of the antagonism between human passions and this path to wisdom. Having applauded this triumphal itinerary of spirituality, Dante forgets everything he has just heard when he learns of his party’s victory in Florence. Passion, violence and vengeance suddenly erase his aspiration to the contemplative joy of the wise. He becomes a partisan again, thinking only of the punishment of his adversaries, and cries out, “Death to the Guelphs!” As if he’d never heard Sigier speak.

The Outcasts is a novel by Honoré de Balzac, published in 1831 by Gosselin, then in 1846 by Furne, Dubochet, Hetzel in Etudes philosophiques. This novel is part of the Book of Mysteries, along with Louis Lambert and Séraphita. This is one of Louis Lambert ‘s themes: Dr. Sieger’s theory that intelligence has several avatars, from the intelligence of the brute to the intelligence of angels. And also the idea that angels live among men, an idea often found in Balzac’s description of female portraits (Esther, the fallen angel of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, looks like an angel and ends her life in a kind of angelic redemption). In his introduction to the philosophical studies, Balzac states, “The warm and learned study of Les Proscrits contains several identical propositions: the suicide of a child whom the ambition of heaven disgusts from life, genius becoming fatal to a great poet.” The rapid denouement of this initially complex story makes this historical sketch (Balzac’s subtitle) an unusual work, expressing the mysticism of the author of La Comédie humaine.

The Story In the early 14th century, Sergeant Tirechair lives in a dark house near Notre-Dame de Paris. He lodges two strangers who frighten him and whom he believes to be capable of witchcraft, although they are actually two gentlemen. The eldest attended the king’s court, while the youngest (Godefroy, Count of Ghent) is the son of Countess Mahaut, hired as a servant by the Tirechis. The sergeant is about to throw them out the same evening the two men attend a mystical theology course. We meet Dr. Sigier and his theory on the mysteries of creation.

The old gentleman, banished from his native Italy, is none other than the poet Dante Alighieri, who has just been told by a horseman that he can return to his native Florence. As for Godefroy, who was about to commit suicide to join the angels, and whom the poet saves in extremis, he ends up back with his mother and his noble status.

The characters Dante Alighieri: Poet banished from his native Italy. Countess Mahaut: Mother of Godefroy in the 14th century. Tirechair: 14th-century watch sergeant; has a wife, Jacqueline. Dr. Sigier: Author of the theory on the mysteries of creation.

1) 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) Notes and topics from Wikipedia.

3) The genealogy of some of the characters is inspired by Félicien Marceau’s “Balzac et son monde – Gallimard”.