La Maison du Chat-Qui-Pelote aka At the Sign of the Cat and Racket by Honore de Balzac Nine out of 10

 La Maison du Chat-Qui-Pelote aka At the Sign of the Cat and Racket by Honore de Balzac

Nine out of 10

With perhaps more than five thousand pages to go – though this reader has read Le Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet – reading La Comedie Humaine is not the task that I usually take upon, given the tendency to lose interest, if the opus is not Magnum, which this surely is and one of the ultimate classics at that, but since the name of my first macaw – and one of two friends at the moment – is Balzac, then there is a duty on more counts than one to engage with the work that is included on the Must Read list of French high schools (my daughter just told me yesterday), serious readers and The Guardian’s 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read compilation - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction - in the State of the Nation section…

The story that opens La Comedie Humaine and the first part, Scenes de la Vie Privee, could be construed as a book on The Secrets of Making Marriage Work avant la lettre, before the ultimate Master of this day, John Gottman, will have written his chef d’oeuvre on the subject where he is the best possible expert – he has an incredible accuracy rate of over 90% in predicting which couples would stay together and which would separate, based seemingly on just a few minutes of interaction – the guru who is a professor and psychologist is known to enter a restaurant and see where the problems are and surely where there is ever lasting bliss in the union…

Balzac knew many of the Secrets before the Seven Secrets of Making Marriage Work will have been published, more than a century later, and anticipated some of the elements needed to Make A Marriage Work – being able to know the partner in exquisite detail…preferences, favorite songs, teams, drink, you name it and the Four horsemen of the Apocalypse that bring disaster with them…Contempt, Stonewalling, Criticism and Defensiveness – those that wreck marriages and the life of couples in general.

The introduction to La Comedie Humaine is also notable, for it speaks of those we want to put on trial, or even kill and the fact that humans tend to call them immoral…’Jesus was immoral’ writes Honore de Balzac, explaining that this is a label that men use before sentencing someone who death…then what caught my attention is the reference to the different religions and the way that faith has an impact…for instance, the author argues that the Catholic woman appears to have a better shot of being sublime, in that this faith favors – to my limited understanding, narrowed further by the almost complete rejection of the dogma, superstition and often outrageous limitations imposed on the faithful – martyrdom, if this is the right sense in which the lines were meant to be understood…

La Maison du Chat-Qui-Pelote is placed on the Rue Saint Denis and we gather that the way it looks will give an idea about ‘ancien Paris’ and it foretells the contrast between new and old, conservative and more liberal views – though the ‘modern’ would be the progress reached when Balzac writes his novel and he is quite critical of the ‘new ways’, such as when he laments the tradition of the master and the commissionaires, the sales agents employed in shops, the latter being too eager to advance and become rich, in the ‘new world’

The House at the Sign of the Cat and Racket is a shop that is owned and run by Monsieur Guillaume, who has three assistants and two daughters, the elder is Virginie and she is twenty eight, and though that is quite an advanced age for that time, she has not received yet a marriage proposal, in spite of the fact that she will be provided with a dowry and furthermore, the father is adamant that she is to exchange marital vows before her younger sister, Augustine, and at one moment, there is a tragicomic scene, wherein the patron talks with his first commissionaire, Joseph Lebas, appreciating his dedication and work – we have learned that the owner is making his staff work ‘comme des negres’ albeit we also learn that the owner of the shop will ensure motherly care, through his wife, and call the doctor if anything bad happens to these three assistants– then talking about the future, what has happened to him in the past, and mentions that he knows the employee is in love…

Exalted, Joseph Lebas hears about the fortune that has come his way, he listens to the details of the material fortune, the number of ecus (the currency of the period in France) and he is unable to believe his luck, for he had been aware of the principles guiding the dictatorial, parsimonious, old fashioned merchant, who was very strict and illiberal, only to see where the mistake was when he utters the name of the woman he loves…Chere Augustine, only to have that refuted by upset, angry Monsieur Guillaume, who retorts that this is not the girl he loves and it gets even more amusing from here, when the lover asks…I do not love her?

There is another man who loves mignone Augustine and this is the painter Theodore de Sommervieux, who opens the novel by standing in front of the House, where we can see the comic painting of a cat maneuvering a huge racket, returning a ball, a building with an interior that would be painted by the artist, together with an exceptional rendering of Mademoiselle Augustine Guillaume, works that will participate at the Salon, where they will attract attention and praise – later on, the emperor will request to see it – and rich aristocrats will want to buy it with large, immense sums, only to be refused by the artist, who is actually rich and belongs to a class that is placed ‘higher’ than the one to which the Guillaume family belongs.

Nonetheless, once the young woman will have visited the exhibition, taken there by a cousin, and meeting the infatuated young knight of the Legion of Honor, the feelings between them are shared and eventually, the two will have been married, in spite of differences – a saying is mentioned, and it has this meaning – ‘if the wife speaks Greek, while the husband speaks Latin, they will starve’- and there is something to say about it (though proverbs and sayings are quite silly) especially after we see what happens to this married couple and in contrast, to the marital peace that dominates the house of Joseph Lebas and Virginie, now also named Lebas, for the latter, in spite of the fact that there was  no love to begin with, the fact that they had been closer in social terms and there was  no cultural, intellectual gap, it seems to work much better.

Against the initial bliss – which could have been extracted from where the fairy tales end…they married lived happily for ever after – the big difference between husband and wife (and his quite despicable character) creates an insurmountable gap and to that we may add the Honeymoon Effect, the notion that after two years, people in couples tend to drift apart, find new partners, unless there is a bond that unites them, and we could say common interests, similar personalities…