The Last Fay
or, The New Marvelous Lamp
by
Honoré de Balzac
Translated, annotated and introduced by
Brian Stableford
A Black Coat Press Book
Introduction
La Dernière fée, ou La Nouvelle Lampe merveilleuse, here translated as The Last Fay; or, The New Marvelous Lamp, was originally published in two volumes in Paris in 1823 bearing the signature “M. Horace de Saint-Aubin,” a pseudonym under which Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) had already issued four other novels. That edition was credited to a consortium of three booksellers and a printer, but it is believed that the author paid for its printing himself. The novel was reissued in three volumes, in a slightly revised version, by Delongchamps in 1825.
As with all of Balzac’s early pseudonymous novels save one—Wann Chlore, ou la Prédestination (1825), which he rewrote as Jane la pâle (1836)—Balzac subsequently disowned it, and it was not until the various editions of his collected works were published after his death that it was added to his recognized canon. Balzac claimed that he had eliminated his early novels from the list of his acknowledged works because they were “collaborations,” and numerous subsequent critics have taken the view that they ought to be regarded as hackwork, but if that was true of any of them, it was surely not the case with La Dernière fée, which the author took some trouble to get into print in spite of the apparent initial indifference of contemporary publishers.
At least some of those early works are probably better considered as experiments that the author subsequently considered to have failed, and thus wanted to discard, especially if they did not fit into the vast cross-sectional patchwork study of contemporary French society that he called La Comédie humaine, which he regarded as the core of his endeavor. He was probably right about their relative failure, but it does not follow from that assessment that they ought to have been buried and forgotten, because failed experiments can often be interesting and educational; that is particularly true of literary experiments that are not only attempting to test an author’s individual capabilities, but are trying to test the capabilities of prose fiction itself, in terms to what might potentially be done with it and how.
In the early 1820s, when Balzac published his various pseudonymous works—some under other names than Horace de St. Aubin—the French Romantic Movement was just beginning to take wing; its leading writers were only just beginning to define themselves as a movement, which initially coalesced around the cénacle founded by Charles Nodier, when he became the librarian at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in 1824. Balzac was not a regular participant Nodier’s cénacle, but he was acquainted with many of the writers who were, and subsequently attended some of the other salons associated with the movement, as well as having an overlapping coterie of his own. One of the works that must have helped to prompt Balzac to write La Dernière fée is Nodier’s Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argail (1822; tr. as Trilby)1, which was itself partly inspired by the fact that leading members of the German Romantic Movement had adopted a radically new attitude to märchen (folktales), in which they hoped to find the essential volksgeist (folk-spirit) of the German-speaking peoples, and had begun writing sophisticated kunstmärchen (art-folktales) in some profusion.
Germany was still fragmented at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and its consolidation as a modern nation-state was severely disrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, whereas France had achieved a much greater degree of unity and national solidity more than a century earlier. There was, in consequence, no incentive for the French Romantics to hunt for an native equivalent of the German volksgeist, and French writers had, in any case, been dabbling with materials akin to those of German kunstmärchen for a long time, ever since a vogue for composing imitation folktales had taken hold in the literary salons associated with Louis XIV’s court and had spawned an entire tradition of fantastic fiction, whose recognized figurehead was Madame d’Aulnoy.
That tradition had a kind of standard reference work in Le Cabinet des fées, ou Collection choisie de contes de fées et autres contes merveilleux [The Showcase of Fays: A Selected Collection of Tales of Enchantment and other marvelous tales]. The first part of the title was initially used on a reissue of Madame d’Aulnoy’s stories published in 1717, but the version with which Balzac was presumably acquainted, and which seems to be the one featured in the novel, was a plush 41-volume set published in Amsterdam between 1785 and 1789, assembled by the Chevalier Charles-Joseph de Mayer, each volume of which was illustrated by engravings made under the direction of Nicolas Delaunay from drawings by Clement-Pierre Marillier. That definitive Cabinet des fées added to the collected works of Madame d’Aulnoy stories by her fellow salon writers, the derivative works of Charles Perrault—which were more ostentatiously adapted for the simultaneous entertainment and civilization [moral education] of children—and, most importantly, the most popular stories taken from Antoine Galland’s Les Mille et une nuits (tr. as The Arabian Nights), which claimed, dubiously in some instances, to be translated from Arabic. That fusion of materials created a syncretic genre in which the “fées” employed by Madame d’Aulnoy and her peers were mingled and confused with the “génies” abundantly featured by Galland. Mayer’s collection was also carefully bowdlerized to remove much of the erotic material featured in the “original” stories, thus establishing the definitive Cabinet des fées as a work not only fit for children but fit to provide the backbone of their literary education.
Given that background, it is inevitable that the French Romantic writers who adopted an interest in mock-folkloristic fiction adopted an attitude to that material markedly different from that of their German counterparts, considerably livelier in tone and manner, although by no means devoid of seriousness. The blithely playful Trilby, about a lutin (goblin or brownie) benevolently smitten with a Scottish housewife, is a cardinal example of that variant attitude. Balzac also began writing in a period when similarly playful stage adaptations of materials from the Cabinet des fées—the ancestors of modern pantomimes—were enjoying something of a vogue in Paris, and one reference in his story strongly suggests that he had seen the comic opera La Petite lampe merveilleuse [The Marvelous Little Lamp] (1822), with music by Alexandre Piccinni and a libretto by Eugène Scribe, the key motif of which is reproduced and transfigured in La Dernière fée.
In the context of those contemporary works, La Dernière fée is, in effect, Balzac’s attempt to join with a popular game, but it is also, to some extent, a reaction against it. The project is obviously an attempt to take up an existing thread, but to twist it in a new direction and to form and entirely new knot: to deploy popular mock-folkoristic materials in a novel way, more advanced in both literary and philosophical terms than the sophistications already added by generations of French writers over the past century. All of those sophistications had, in one way or another, attempted to introduce a certain dose of “realism”—or cynicism—into the fantastic backcloth provided by the tales, challenging their seeming naivety with deft irony, but Balzac wanted to alter that dose, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to produce a new alloy, as he was later to do in some of the “philosophical studies” that formed the most eccentric section of La Comédie humaine. The narrative strategy of La Dernière fée is markedly different from that of the author’s later fantasy of wish-granting. La Peau de Chagrin (1831; tr. under various titles, including The Magic Skin) and there is no doubt that the narrative strategy of the latter novel is far more successful, but the earlier one is interesting not as a kind of preliminary sketch, but as an alternative approach to the problem.
It is impossible to discuss that narrative strategy in detail at this point without introducing spoilers that would u
ndermine the dramatic tension of the story, so I shall add a further comment on what the author achieved—partially, at least—in an afterword. In terms of introducing the novel, however, it is important to note that a difference in their attitude to mock-folkloristic materials was not the only thing that distinguished French writers associated with the Romantic Movement from German ones. The French Movement also took aboard a powerful specific influence from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was the primary domestic inspiration of the writer and critic who gave French Romanticism its name and definition, Madame de Staël.
Rousseau’s influence was particularly strong in respect of his famous argument that humans were once naturally virtuous, and only became vicious because of the deleterious effects of civilization; the literary figuration and analysis of various exemplars of the Rousseauesque unspoiled “Child of Nature” is very prolific in Romantic writings, some offered in earnest support of the philosopher’s controversial allegation, some in scathing demolition of it, and some in a spirit of inquisitive ambiguity. The first great prose classic of the French Movement, François-René de Châteaubriand’s Atala (1801) was an intended criticism that many readers misinterpreted as a celebration. The hero of La Dernière fée is Balzac’s version of a Child of Nature, and is just as distinctive and idiosyncratic as the story’s treatment of materials borrowed from the Cabinet des fées. Indeed, the fact that Balzac’s Child of Nature is selectively “civilized” by tales explicitly designed for the civilization of children, rather than by the social forces of literal civilization that Rousseau thought deleterious, is the central irony of the story.
When seen in the context of French Romantic fiction, therefore, and as a contribution to the evolution of modern fantastic fiction, La Derniere fée is by no means a negligible work, and it still bears an interesting relationship to the genre of modern fantasy that has flourished in Britain, America in France in the last forty years. In the context of that modern fantasy genre there has been a new boom in the production of transfigurative works reprocessing the materials of the Cabinet des fées, and the genre has also claimed and taken aboard numerous recent exemplars of the Child of Nature, most famously and most strikingly Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan.
The Cabinet des fées, and the genre that it helped to define, has always been cursed by problems of translation rising from the confusion and reconfiguration of once-distinct sets of hypothetical beings associated with the folklore of different societies. Madame d’Aulnoy’s description of “contes de fées” was translated into English as “fairy stories,” although the French féerie mans “enchantment” and fées are, strictly speaking, enchantresses (as in the Arthurian Morgan le Fay). The English term “fairy” can relate to various folkloristic figures, including Teutonic elves, but the term was given a crucial literary figuration in Elizabethan times by William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, particularly the former’s characterization of the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which exerted an enormous influence on subsequent literary and artistic imagery. Although some confusion between Shakespearean fairies and French fées is evident in the Cabinet des fées, and is thus carried forward into much nineteenth-century mock-folkloristic fiction, there is a certain awkwardness about the conventional translation, and I prefer the translation “fays,” which I have employed in the present text.
Confusions also arise because of Galland’s use of the term “génie” [genius], which is usually transcribed directly, and neologistically, in English versions of his stories and their derivatives as “genie” instead of being translated. Galland was, however, translating the Arabic word djinni, whose plural is djinn, and it is arguable that the supposed similarity between Arabic djinn and French génies is even more problematic than that between French fées and English fairies. Again, I have elected to emphasize the problematic features of the syncretic genre by translating Balzac’s génie and génies not as genie and genies but as djinni and djinn. This might seem disconcerting, but it does help to emphasize the calculated impropriety of Balzac’s idiosyncratic representation of the supposed relationship between génies and enchanteurs [enchanters] in the Empire of the Fays, which makes the hypothetical species comprised by the two categories into a masculine equivalent of fees; the logic of the author’s decision to do that will eventually become manifest to readers within the story.
This translation was made from the London Library’s copy of the 1963 facsimile of the 1823 edition published in Paris by Les Bibliophile de l’Originale. Comparative reference was also made version of the 1976 Slatkine facsimile reprint of the 1825 edition reproduced on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website. It is arguable that the latter text ought to be regarded as the definitive one by virtue of having been revised, but the amendments are mostly trivial and do not seem to me to constitute significant improvements; I have therefore preferred the earlier version.
Brian Stableford
THE LAST FAY
Chapter I
The Chemist
There was once a chemist and his wife who lived happily together; the husband loved crucibles, and the wife cherished retorts, from which it followed that they had the most agreeable life possible. With his spectacles wedged on his nose, the chemist was always occupied watching his flasks boil, sometimes stimulating the fire with an old bellows; he did not say a word, and his wife, sitting in the laboratory, did not complain about the smoke, the charcoal or the odor; she did not speak any more than her husband, for her only language was the amiable smile that she made to wander over her naïve lips when, fatigued by his work, he decided to dart a glance at his cherished wife. She was a beautiful woman, and he was a handsome man, but as they stayed in their laboratory all day, and did not look at one another often, and as they adored one another and scarcely thought about their appearance, you might not have perceived their beauty at first.
The laboratory where they lived resembled a cellar; the walls could have rendered thirty quintals of soot if anyone had cared to clean them. The glass in the window, which was almost ogival, with small panes retained by lead, had achieved a veto over the daylight, which it almost prevented from passing through, so thick with dust was it; but outside, a joyful vine played elegantly. The tiled floor, always damp and dirty, offered singular aspects; here and there, a neat circle or square was perceptible, like a newly-minted coin, because a physical object had remained there for some time.
Finally, it was legible in the furrows of the dust imprinted by the broom how rarely a generous hand had desired to bring order to the chaos. One might have imagined that the spiders had lived so long in peace that they had assembled one day to make a constitution, but that they had stopped at the clause that would have granted individual liberty to flies; the voice of a cricket was often audible, rejoicing in not being troubled in its shelter by interference; and more than one mouse ran around tranquilly in that abode of innocence, peace and chemistry, without fear of sword-thrusts or baited traps.
In the middle of that mass of tables, bottles and instruments, the chemist, his hair covered with the white ash of his charcoal, pored over a retort, and the fire cast its ruddy reflection over everything that surrounded him, which faded away over the chemist’s wife, who was alternately working and looking at the interior with a satisfied expression. The black vault, the absence of sunlight—which only showed itself in the space left between the door and the window—the chemical apparatus and the chemist husband would not have pleased everyone, but since the chemist and his wife were happy, no one ought to criticize them, for people might think that happiness depends on a thrust of the broom, the death of a cricket, a spider’s web or the tail of a poor mouse, but it actually depends on something else entirely.
One morning in spring, a window had been opened; pure air was circulating and the sun, sending one of its most beautiful rays into the laboratory, was tracing a bright line, in which a multitude of little motes of dust were floating, which seemed to be running after one another like swarms of flies about a stea
m on a beautiful summer evening. The cricket that had been crying like a cantor at the funeral of a village seigneur met a female cricket and shut up; the mouse went back to its hole with a rat; and, the gentle influence of the air penetrating the chemist, he looked at his wife.
She was sitting in a worm-eaten armchair, amusing herself contemplating, for the thousandth time, the illustrations in the Cabinet des fées; her ingenuousness was painted on her face, her pale golden hair, arranged in a maidenly manner, added to a radiance of innocence in her blue eyes, devoid of malice. She divined that her husband was looking at her, and abandoned her book to look at her spouse. The chemist reflected, in the midst of the silence, that the young woman that he had taken merely to refresh his eyes during his long toil might have become something other than something to look at.
It cost him a great many test tubes to find out, he broke more than one bottle and the peace of the laboratory was troubled for the first time in five years. The chemist spilled I don’t know how many ingredients, and his fire went out. The chemist’s wife, like Psyche receiving the first kiss of Amour, said nothing. A few months later, however, she screamed so loudly that it was audible for a quarter of a league around, and terror reigned in the nearby village—you shall know why in due course. In short, those screams were motivated by the coming into the world of a child as beautiful as the day.
The laboratory was henceforth witness to the most charming scenes; the black vault resounded with infantile cries, and the chemist had no complaint to make about it. Caliban, quitting the spade, came to look through the window, trying to make his horrible coarse face smile, and adopting a pretty voice to speak to the child. The chemist’s wife, still sitting in her worm-eaten armchair, bounced the brat on her knees, covering him with kisses as soon as he smiled. She excited his laughter, and if he broke a test tube the chemist laughed, saying that he had already been the cause of the loss of more than one.
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