Volume 20, Number 2 · February 22, 1973
Balzac at Thirty
By V.S. Pritchett
Like Dickens, Balzac contained his age, and again like Dickens he had an immediate sense of his public. When later on he was criticized for potboiling he said hotly that an artist who has no private means and who is not supported by some sinecure in his government has to pay attention to popular taste and the demands of editors. The young Balzac first reached a large public with a very hot boiler. There was a passing craze for revaluations—what were called physiologies; and in 1829, Balzac dashed off a Physiologie du mariage—'by a Bachelor.' He was thirty. The book was not only wittily topical; it drew on something central and quite serious in Balzac's nature. The cynical bachelor did really think that marriage ought to be made more agreeable among the rising middle classes. The book made him notorious if not famous, and established him in the minds of a large number of women readers. They might be angry, they might be admiring, they wrote hundreds of arguing, confessional, or ecstatic letters to the writer who was so much on their side and who had the gift of intimacy. For the rest of his life women were his chief correspondents.
Feature, 4526 words
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