Compass

by Mathias Enard

  Incredible to think that Metternich himself was so enthralled by this debt-ridden man, who was living in Paris under assumed names, running around Europe pursuing the woman he loved, between writing novels. What could they have been talking about, for two hours? European politics? Balzac’s opinions on the government of Louis-Philippe? La Peau de chagrin? Sarah’s article especially foregrounds Mme Hanska’s role as mediator between Balzac and the Orient; when Hammer finally gave Balzac the Arabic translation of the text that is included in La Peau de chagrin, he did so through Countess Rzewuska. Similarly, the interview with Metternich is certainly thanks to her. I imagine Balzac in Saché, holed up with his papers, pen, and coffeemaker, scarcely going out, and then only to wander around the park and stretch his legs; he lived like an oyster, as he said; he would go down to the river, collect a few fallen chestnuts and throw them in the water, before climbing back up to pick up Le Père Goriot where he had left off; is he the same man as the hopeless lover of Vienna, always rejected by the prudish Évelyne Hanska, turned down for fifteen years, that says a lot about Balzac’s strength of character and patience. He ended up marrying her, in 1850, that’s reassuring; just before dying five months later, which is less so. Maybe it was partly desire that kept this staggering man from falling, you get the impression that Balzac ruined himself in work and writing because he was staggering, because his life (outside of his sentences, where he is God) escaped him, that he tottered from creditor to creditor, from impossible love to unsatisfied desire and that only books are a world made to his measure, he who was a printer before being a writer. Three thousand pages of letters, that is the monument he built to his love, and often, he spoke to Évelyne about Vienna, about his future journey to Vienna, where he hoped to go to visit Wagram and the battlefields in Essling, since he had it in mind to write a story about a battle, a formidable battle story, which would take place entirely in the heart of combat, without ever leaving it, in one furious day; like Sarah in Saint-Gothard, I picture Balzac pacing up and down Aspern, taking notes, imagining the troop movements on the hills, the place where Maréchal Lannes was fatally wounded, locating the lines of sight, the trees in the distance, the shape of the hills, all things that he will never write, because he lingered in Vienna and this project may only have been a pretext: he will be too occupied, afterward, wrestling with La Comédie humaine to find the time to give substance to this idea — just as Sarah, as far as I know, never wrote in detail about her vision of the battle of Morgersdorf, mixing all the stories, Turkish and Christian, accompanied by the music of Pál Esterházy, if she ever planned to do so.

  Oh look, in this article Sarah reproduces the engraving of Hainfeld castle that Hammer-Purgstall sent to Balzac after he went back to Paris, I must have visited all the antique shops in Vienna to do her this favor — Hammer-Purgstall sent an image of his castle to his friends the way we’d send a photograph today, that kind Hammer-Purgstall whom Balzac says is “patient as a goat straining at its tether” and to whom he will dedicate The Cabinet of Antiquities, to thank him for his knowledge of Orientalism. I suppose I was running around all the antique dealers in Vienna like Balzac behind Évelyne Hanska, madly, until I got my hands on this image, which she reproduces in the midst of quotations from the correspondence related to his stay in Vienna:

  April 28, 1834: If I were rich, I’d enjoy sending you a painting, an Interior of Algiers, painted by Delacroix, which seems excellent to me.31

  March 9, 1834: Between now and Vienna, there’s nothing but work and solitude.32

  August 11, 1834: Oh, to spend the winter in Vienna. I’ll be there, yes.33

  August 25, 1834: I truly need to see Vienna. I must explore the fields of Wagram and Essling before next June. I especially need engravings that show the uniforms of the German army, and I will go look for them. Have the goodness to tell me only whether or not they exist.34

  October 18, 1834: Yes, I’ve breathed in a little of the Touraine autumn; I’ve imitated the plant, the oyster, and when the sky was so clear, I thought that was an omen and that a dove would come from Vienna with a green branch in its beak.35

  Poor Balzac, what did he get in Vienna, a few kisses and some promises, if we are to believe these letters that Sarah quotes abundantly — and I, who so looked forward to her coming to my capital, to the point of buying new clothes and getting my hair cut each time she came, what did I get, another offprint I don’t dare decipher — life ties knots, life ties knots and they’re rarely those on St. Francis’s cincture; we meet, we run after one another, for years, in the dark, and when we think we finally hold another’s hand in ours, death takes everything away from us.

  Jane Digby does not appear in Sarah’s article on Balzac and the Orient, but she’s one of the indirect links between the man from Touraine and Syria; the beautiful, sublime Jane Digby, whose body, face, and dreamy eyes wrought such havoc in nineteenth-century Europe and the Orient — one of the most surprising lives of the time, one of the most adventurous, in every sense of the word. A scandalous Englishwoman, divorced at twenty, banished for her “promiscuity” by Victorian England, then successively mistress of an Austrian nobleman, wife of a Bavarian baron, lover of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, married to a Greek nobleman answering to the magnificent name of Count Spyridon Theotokis, finally abducted (not unwillingly) by an Albanian pirate, Lady Jane Ellenborough née Digby ended up finding stability in love in the desert, between Damascus and Palmyra, in the arms of Sheikh Medjuel el-Mezrab, prince of the tribe of the Annazahs, a man twenty years her junior, whom she married when she was over fifty. She lived the last twenty years of her life in Syria, in the most perfect happiness, or almost — she experienced the horrors of war during the 1860 massacres, when she was saved by the intervention of Emir Abd el-Kader, exiled in Damascus, who protected many Syrian and European Christians. But no doubt the most atrocious episode of her existence took place much earlier, in Italy, in Bagni di Lucca, at the foot of the Apennines. That evening, Leonidas, her six-year-old son, whom she loved immensely, wanted to join his mother, whom he saw down below, in front of the hotel porch, from his bedroom balcony — he leaned over, fell, and was crushed on the terrace floor, at his mother’s feet, dead instantaneously.

  It was perhaps this horrible accident that prevented Jane from experiencing happiness anywhere else but at the end of the world, in the desert of oblivion and love — her life, like Sarah’s, is a long road to the East, a series of stations that led her, inexorably, ever further toward the Orient in search of something indefinable. Balzac met this extraordinary woman at the beginning of her immense journey, in Paris at first, around 1835, when “Lady Ell” was cheating on her Bavarian Baron von Venningen with Theotokis; Balzac tells Mme Hanska that Lady Ell had just run away again with a Greek, that her husband arrived, dueled with the Greek, left him for dead and brought his wife home before having the lover treated — ”what a singular woman,” Balzac notes. Then, a few years later, returning from Vienna, he stops at the castle of Weinheim, near Heidelberg, to visit Jane; he relates these days by letter to Mme Hanska and we can legitimately suspect that he is lying, so as not to set off Évelyne’s jealous rages, which we know were frequent, when he says “another one of those accusations that make me laugh.” I wonder if Balzac was indeed seduced by the scandalous adventuress with the blue eyes, it’s possible; we know she was partly the inspiration for the character of Lady Arabelle Dudley in his Lily of the Valley, Lady Dudley the conquering, the loving, the carnal. I read that novel a few miles from Saché, in those Touraine landscapes where Lady Dudley and that idiot Félix de Vandenesse galloped; I cried for the poor Henriette, who died from sadness — I was a little jealous, too, of the erotic pleasures the fiery Arabelle offered Félix. Already Balzac was contrasting a chaste, dull West with the delights of the Orient; you get the impression he’s glimpsing — through the paintings of Delacroix, which he so appreciates, and in the Orientalist imagination that’s already being woven — Jane Dig
by’s later fate, like a prophet or a seer: “Her desire goes like a whirlwind in the desert, the desert whose ardent immensity appears to her, the desert full of azure, with its inalterable sky, with its cool starry nights,” he writes about Lady Dudley before a long comparison of the West and the East, Lady Dudley like the Orient “exuding her soul, enveloping her devotees in a luminous atmosphere,” and at Grandmother’s house, in that squat armchair with the embroidered antimacassar, near the window whose white lace curtains let the light through, already filtered by the thin oaks at the forest’s edge, I pictured myself on horseback with that British huntress Diana while still wishing (I was at the edge of childhood) that Félix would end up marrying the gloomy Henriette, hesitating as I too was between the transports of the soul and the pleasures of the flesh.

  Balzac and Hanska, Majnun and Layla, Jane Digby and Sheikh Medjuel, there’s some good material for a book, a book, why not, I could write a book, I can already picture the cover:

  On the Divers Forms of Lunacie in the Orient

  Volume the First

  Orientalists in Love

  There would be some good material there, with all sorts of people gone mad from love, happy or unhappy, mystical or pornographic, women and men, if only I were good for anything besides harping over old stories, sitting in my bed, if I had the energy of Balzac or Liszt, and especially the health — I don’t know what will happen to me over the next few days, I’ll have to give myself up to medicine, that is, to the worst, I can’t picture myself at all in the hospital, what will I do with my nights of insomnia? Victor Hugo the Oriental relates the dying agony of Balzac in Things Seen: M. de Balzac was in his bed, he says, his head resting on a pile of pillows to which they had added red Damascus cushions borrowed from the bedroom sofa. His face was purple, almost black, leaning to the right, beard unshaven, hair gray and cut short, eyes open and staring. An unbearable odor emanated from the bed. Hugo lifted the blanket and took Balzac’s hand. It was covered in sweat. He squeezed it. Balzac did not respond to the pressure. An old woman — standing guard — and a male servant stood on either side of the bed. A candle was burning on a table behind the head of the bed, another on a commode near the door. A silver vase was placed on the bedside table. The man and the woman remained silent with a kind of terror, listening to the dying man groaning noisily, Mme Hanska had gone back to her room, no doubt because she couldn’t bear her husband’s death rattle, his agony: Hugo relates all sorts of horrors about the abscess on Balzac’s leg, which had been lanced a few days before.

  What a curse the body is, why didn’t they give Balzac opium or morphine as they did to Heinrich Heine, poor Heine’s body, he too, Heine, convinced he was dying slowly of syphilis whereas doctors today are more inclined to diagnose it as multiple sclerosis, in any case a long degenerative disease that confined him to bed for years, good Lord, a scientific article itemizes the doses of morphine that Heine took, helped by a kind pharmacist who had made this recent innovation available to him, morphine, the essence of the sap of the divine poppy — at least in the twenty-first century they don’t refuse a dying man this medication, they just try to withhold it from the living. I forget which French writer reproached us for being alive while Beethoven is dead, which had irritated me no end, the title was When I Think That Beethoven Is Dead While So Many Imbeciles Are Alive, or something similar, it divided humanity into two categories, the idiots, and the Beethovens, and it was pretty clear that this author certainly counted himself among the Beethovens, whose immortal glory would redeem present defects, and he wished us all dead, to avenge the death of the maestro from Bonn: in that Parisian bookstore, Sarah, who sometimes lacks discernment, found this title funny — she must have reproached me once again for my seriousness, my intransigence, as if she weren’t — intransigent, that is. The bookstore was on the Place de Clichy, at the end of our expedition to the home of Sadegh Hedayat on rue Championnet and to the Montmartre cemetery where we had seen the graves of Heine and Berlioz, before a dinner in a pleasant brasserie with a German name, I think. Probably my anger against that book (whose author also seems to me to have a German patronymic, another coincidence) was a desire on my part to draw attention to myself, to make myself noticed at the expense of that writer, to shine for my knowledge of Beethoven — Sarah was in the midst of writing her thesis, she had eyes only for Sadegh Hedayat or Annemarie Schwarzenbach. She had lost a lot of weight, was working fourteen or even sixteen hours a day, rarely went out, was thrashing about in her research, eating almost nothing; and despite it all she looked happy. After the incident in Aleppo, in the Baron Hotel room, I hadn’t seen her for months, suffocated as I was by shame. It was very selfish on my part to bother her mid-thesis with my jealousy, what a pretentious idiot: I was acting jealous when I should have been taking care of her, looking after her, and above all not getting on my Beethovenian high horse, which I’ve noticed, with time, never makes me very popular with women. Maybe, at bottom, what annoyed me so much about the title, When I Think That Beethoven Is Dead While So Many Imbeciles Are Alive, is that its author had found a way to make himself funny and sympathetic in talking about Beethoven, something that generations of musicologists, mine included, have sought to do in vain.

  Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall the Orientalist, him again, relates that he visited Beethoven in Vienna through Dr. Glossé. What a world these capitals were in the early nineteenth century, where Orientalists visited princes, Balzacs, and musicians of genius. His memoirs even contain a terrifying anecdote, from 1815: Hammer is attending a concert of Beethoven’s, in one of those extraordinary Viennese salons; you can easily picture the cabriole chairs, the footmen, the hundreds of candles, the crystal chandeliers; it’s cold, it’s winter, the winter of the Congress of Vienna, and the home of Countess Thérèse Apponyi, the hostess, has been heated as much as possible — she is barely thirty, she does not know that a few years later she will have le Tout-Paris under her charm; Antoine and Thérèse Apponyi will be the hosts, at their Embassy in the faubourg Saint-Germain, of all the writers, artists, and important musicians there are in the French capital. The noble Austrian couple will be friends with Chopin, Liszt, the scandalous George Sand; they will play host to Balzac, Hugo, Lamartine and all the troublemakers of 1830. But that winter evening, it’s Beethoven who is her guest; Beethoven, who hasn’t gone out in society for months — like the big cats it’s no doubt hunger that draws him out of his sad lair, he needs money, love and money. So he gives a concert for Countess Apponyi and her immense circle of friends, including Hammer. The diplomat Orientalist is indeed in the court during the Congress of Vienna, where he became close to Metternich; he associated with Talleyrand, about whom no one can decide whether he’s a perverse ferret or a haughty falcon — a beast of prey, in any case. Europe is celebrating peace, rediscovering equilibrium in the game of power, and especially the end of Napoleon, who is stamping his feet on the island of Elba; the Hundred Days will pass like a shiver of fear in the spine of an Englishman. Napoleon Bonaparte is the inventor of Orientalism, he’s the one who drags science behind his army into Egypt and makes Europe penetrate the Orient beyond the Balkans for the first time. Knowledge rushes behind the soldiers and the merchants, into Egypt, India, China; texts translated from Arabic and Persian begin to invade Europe, Goethe the great oak started the race; long before Hugo’s Les Orientales, at the very time Chateaubriand was inventing travel literature with his Itinerary: From Paris to Jerusalem, as Beethoven is playing that night for the little Italian countess married to a Hungarian surrounded by the finest costumes in Vienna, the immense Goethe is putting the final touches on his West-östlicher Divan, directly inspired by the translation of Hafez that Hammer-Purgstall published (Hammer-Purgstall is there of course, they take his coat, he bends forward to pretend to brush his lips against the glove of Teresa Apponyi, smiling, for he knows her very well, her husband is also a diplomat in the Metternich circle) in 1812, while that dragon Napoleon, that horrible Mediterranean, was th
inking he could confront the Russians and their terrifying winter, three thousand leagues from France. That evening, as Napoleon is tapping his foot waiting for the boats in Elba, there is Beethoven, and there is the old Hafez, and Goethe, and thus Schubert, who will set to music some poems from the West-östlicher Divan, and Mendelssohn, and Schumann, and Strauss, and Schönberg, they too will use these poems by Goethe the immense, and next to Countess Apponyi is the impetuous Chopin, who will dedicate two Nocturnes to her; near Hammer sit Rückert and Mowlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi — and Ludwig van Beethoven, the master of all these fine people, sits down to the piano.

  We can picture Talleyrand, warmed all of a sudden by the faience stoves, dozing off even before the composer’s fingers touch the keyboard; Talleyrand that lame devil who has played all night, but cards, not music: a little game of faro with wine, lots of wine, and his eyes are drooping. He’s the most elegant of defrocked bishops, and the most original as well; he has served God, Louis XVI, the Convention, the Directory, Napoleon, and Louis XVIII, he will serve Louis-Philippe and become the statesman the French will look up to above all others, the French who sincerely believe that functionaries should be like Talleyrand, like permanent buildings and churches that resist all storms and embody the famous continuity of State, that is, the spinelessness of those who subordinate their convictions to power, whatever it may be — Talleyrand will pay homage to Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt and to all the knowledge that Denon and his scholars brought back about ancient Egypt, instructing his own body to be embalmed à l’égyptienne, mummified, going along with the fashion for pharaohs that invaded Paris, putting a little of the Orient into his coffin, Talleyrand the prince who had always dreamed of transforming his boudoir into a harem.