The life of Honoré de Balzac coincides neatly with a particularly turbulent period of French history. He was born in 1799, the year the First Republic ended with Napoleon naming himself First Consul, and died in 1850, two years after the Second Republic was declared (and two years before President Charles Louis Napoléon Bonaparte led the coup that made him Emperor and inaugurated the Second Empire). It was a dizzying time to be alive, and it was this period of upheaval and rapid change during his own lifetime that Balzac took as his principal subject.
With few exceptions, Balzac’s massive body of work (some 90 novels, short stories, novellas, and plays, as well as many articles and his voluminous personal correspondence comprising The Human Comedy), chronicles the tumultuous early 19th-century. Many of these, such as Père Goriot, depict a whole society in microcosm; others, like The Lily in the Valley, take the major events as the backdrop to private dramas.
The Lily in the Valley begins in the Touraine 1814, at a ball celebrating the return to power of the Bourbon monarchy. Twenty-year-old Félix de Vandenesse finds himself “bewitched” at the sight of a woman’s “white, rounded shoulders” and throws himself on her, kissing the exposed flesh. He later makes a more proper acquaintance with the offended woman, Henriette de Mortsauf, several years his senior, wife of the Count de Mortsauf, and mother to two sickly children. Félix insinuates himself into the family’s life, and, over the next several years, the two conduct a torturously repressed love affair, one that is neither consummated nor ever entirely innocent. Félix becomes the paramour of the older Englishwoman Lady Arabella Dudley, and after rows with her and Henriette, the former leaves him and the latter takes to her bed with a wasting illness, dying after a dramatic deathbed confession. Félix tells this story of bereavement, of love lost and frustrated, in a long letter, running to some 250 pages, to his current love, Comtesse Natalie de Mannerville, whose response constitutes the final few pages of the novel.
It is a perplexing novel, and one that shows a side of Balzac not often seen. Balzac is rightly regarded as one of the progenitors of the realist novel depicting broad swathes of society (as in Père Goriot, The Wrong Side of Paris, and Lost Illusions), but The Lily in the Valley is something else. The author’s own classification of the work as among the “Scenes of Country Life” in The Human Comedy fails to do justice to the how strange and how ahead of its time the novel was. Balzac took as his basis well-established tropes — the forbidden romance, the love triangle of differing temperaments, the unhappily married woman, the young man on the rise — and the epistolary novel form to create a pre-Freudian exploration of thwarted, repressed sexuality and deceit (of self and others). Félix’s first encounter with Henriette is set up as a contrast with the callousness of his mother and sisters, and from the moment he “[throws himself] at that back as an infant throws himself on his mother’s bosom,” their desire is partly sublimated and partly repressed. Much of this frustrated desire is expressed through the bouquets, the “symphonies of flowers,” that Félix gathers for Henriette, floral language and imagery forming the core of the novel. Sexual desire denied also finds expression as superficially chaste vows to love one another as brother and sister or as mother and son, with Félix sometimes speaking in baby talk as part of his adoption of the role of child. “And what about mine, mummy?” The oedipal, incestuous fantasy is further evident in Henriette’s plan, first announced early in their acquaintance and restated as her dying wish, that Félix marry her daughter Madeleine when she is of age. “As for Madeleine, she will marry; I hope one day she will take to you! She is myself all over again … If your fates are wedded, she will be happier than I ever was.” There may also be significance to Henriette’s married name, Mortsauf (which might be translated as “unless dead”), as the novelist’s pre-Freudian intuition of the interrelation of the sex drive and the death drive.
Balzac also demonstrates astute insight into the drive closely related to sexual desire: dominance. Félix, in a rather Sadean move, opens his letter to Natalie with a claim to acquiescence (“I will bow to your wishes”) that is belied by the letter’s length and the way his own story indicates his practice of feigning meekness as a means of controlling others. He uses a comparable strategy in the long rounds of trictrac (similar to backgammon) with Henriette’s husband, le Comte de Mortsauf, winning and losing in patterns calculated so as to control the man’s tempestuous moods to Félix’s advantage. Henriette plays a similar game of dominating through professions of chastity and fidelity, confessing in her final outburst, as she dies of “hunger and wayward desire,” that all her feigned virtue concealed a wish to consume Félix. “They believe my most grievous pain is thirst. Yes, my friend, I do thirst. I long to see the waters of the Indre, but I have a more burning thirst. I thirst for you […] Everything has been a lie in my life […] How can I die when I have never lived[?]”
That Félix rather than a third-person narrator tells the story makes for a study in distorted perspective and what is often called the unreliable narrator. (Any first-person narrator in a work of fiction with depth will be, as any real person, unreliable to some extent.) Readers see the characters (with the exception of Natalie) only as Félix presents them, as if through an occluded glass, and thus have to read past his distorted perceptions in an attempt to understand them. Félix, except when he wonders briefly if he belongs “to a race of tigers,” seems to understand neither himself nor how his actions hurt others. (Writing hundreds of pages to his current paramour on women he loved before evinces, as Natalie points out in her reply, astounding obtuseness. What was he thinking?)
This new translation of The Lily in the Valley from NYRB is a worthy addition to the Balzacian corpus available in English and to NYRB’s Balzac collection. The Lily in the Valley is among Balzac’s rarely translated works, the last English translation being Lucienne Hill’s in 1989, long out of print. The first English translation, made in the late 1800s by Katherine Wormeley, although not currently in print, is in the public domain and available online. As the first to translate into English Balzac’s entire oeuvre into English, Wormeley deserves continued respect, but her translations, now nearly a century and a half old, seem dated and dusty at times with archaisms such as “Fain would I.” Peter Bush provides a fresh, vibrant translation of The Lily in the Valley, especially in his adroit rendering of the floral language, its colors and textures and smells, so crucial to the novel’s pastoral setting and to flowers as Henriette’s and Félix’s oblique means of expressing sexual desire. “Imagine flowers bubbling out of two vases like a spring, vaguely forming two surrounds, from the center of which my wishes surged as white roses, as lilies to the silver cup. Cornflower, forget-me-nots and viper’s bugloss, blue flowers all with sky-tinted hues shone against this luminous backcloth.” Bush has also rendered the title as The Lily in the Valley, correcting the previously prevailing translation of the French title Le lys dans la vallée as The Lily of the Valley, which, in English, suggests what in English is commonly called lily-of-the-valley (muguet in French) rather than a genuine white lily. This small but important difference preserves the novel’s central metaphor of Henriette as a flower of the Touraine and, more abstractly, the yonic symbolism of both “lily” and “valley.”
As a whole, NYRB’s Balzac titles — The Unknown Masterpiece, Memoirs of Two Young Wives, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, and, now, The Lily in Valley — demonstrate Balzac’s breadth of imagination and profound understanding of humanity. The NYRB Balzac editions make available in English the author’s lesser known, less frequently translated works, the forgotten gems and deep cuts that continue to delight, to challenge, to surprise. More than any of these works, and more than most other works available in English translation, The Lily in the Valley shows a Balzac with an understanding of psychology that predates by decades psychoanalytic theory. It is a novel that repurposes and modifies tropes to dramatize unconscious drives, the complex interplay of domination and submission, repression, and sublimation, set against the Bourbon Restoration, which, when read in conjunction with the rest of the immense corpus that is The Human Comedy, chronicles the emergence of modernity. As Peter Brooks writes in Balzac’s Lives, “Balzac remains the first and still the greatest guide to the modern world.” The new translation reaffirms this and serves as a reminder of how little of Balzac’s achievement is in print in English and how much remains to be rediscovered.