The Last Incarnation of Vautrin as Capitalism’s hero

This paper proposes to review the various incarnations of Vautrin, or Jacques Collins in the mind of critics and of Balzac himself only to add at the very end another one. This new incarnation that this paper is proposing is that of Vautrin as the hero of capitalism following Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Jacques Collin would be her John Galt.

The paper will progress through a detailed examination of the various sources we have available for discovering the most enigmatic and fascinating character that Balzac ever created. He appears as a major character in no less than 4 of the great books of “La Comedie humaine”: Le Pere Goriot, Illusions perdues, Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes, and in La dernier Incarnation de Vautrin, (and as a minor character in who knows how many others) but he also has an entire play dedicated and named after him, Vautrin.

We will start of course with an examination of what Balzac wrote about Vautrin himself and then proceed to critical interpretations of Vautrin. We will see him as Balzac’ Double (alter-ego), the portrait of a real man Vidoq, as The Fallen Angel of Victor Hugo, and finally as Capitalism’s Hero.

Because of the scope of this paper we will examine just two sources from Balzac: Le Pere Goriot and the play Vautrin. It is interesting to note that Vautrin was performed for the first time at the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre, Paris March 14, 1840 while the publishing house of Werde published Pere Goriot as a novel in March 1835. Illusions perdues is the name of two separate novels one published in 1837 and one published in 1839. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes was published in four parts from 1838-1847, and “La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin” was first published in 1842. As we can see, Vautrin comes after Le Pere Goriot, during the writing of Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes.

Since we now that Balzac started writing Pere Goriot in 1834, we can assume that he was obsessed or at least infatuated with Vautrin for at least 13 years, at least that is as a literary character. But since Balzac cannot be described without being a realist and as someone who took everything from real life, the antecedents of this character take us back even further, specifically to the winter of 1828. At that time a French criminal king turned chief of the police named Eugène François Vidocq published a pair of memoirs recounting his criminal exploits. Balzac met Vidocq in April 1834, and used him as a model for a character named Vautrin he was planning for an upcoming novel.[1]

We first hear of Vautrin in the opening pagers of Le Pere Goriot. Its place in the book is very logical because Balzac starts the novel off by a complete description of the place the live in and the characters that live there. He has also placed the description of Vautrin at a significant point in the order by which he presents the characters. He has paired up 4 characters in the pages before (la demoiselle Michonneau with Poiret, who are similar, and Victorine and Madame Couture who is her governess). After Vautrin, he will describe Goriot. [2]

Not only does he describe Vautrin as the best of police novels do, he also sets the stage for what will become for some readers an obsession with the enigma of Vautrin. This is tremendously important in the context of Balzac’s work, because as McCarthy lets us known in her book: “In an article entitled “Balzac et le dechiffrement des signes,” Jean Luis Bourget claimed that “Dechiffrement” (“deciphering”) is the essential theme, motif, and structure of La Comedie humaine…A character that is certainly one of the most significant metaphors of dechiffrement in Balzac’s work is Jacques Collin.” [3]

Throughout all of the books that make reference to Vautrin we have to keep “Deciphering” who is this Vautrin that is presented to us. His many names add to the beauty of the game, but even then he’s so mysterious that “names alone will not do. In Le Pere goriot, the narrator also calls him, among many other names, a “sphinx en perruque” (3:133), “le tentateur”(3:163) and “ce demon”(3:184)”[4]

Later on McCarthy explains what she means by metaphor in the first quote mentioned above. Vautrin is not only a metaphor of a literary technique (Dechiffrement) and an “essential theme, motif and structure of La Comedie humaine” but also a metaphor of how we should read La Comedie Humaine, That is to say, the challenge that such a large and cluttered work poses to us and also the challenge it was for him to write it in the first place. This is why later this paper argues that Vautrin is indeed Balzac’s alter ego. “Jacques Collin, with his constant enticement to perceive beyond, is a metaphor for the challenge that Balzac extended to us within La Comedie humaine, a challenge that he himself accepted, to grasp the essential nature of reality.”[5] In the end Vautrin is Balzac: “

It is not for nothing that the sovereign ruler of the Balzacian kingdom is Vautrin, the great rebel, all of whose qualities imitate Balzac’s and resemble Satan’s. He has a taste for souls, which is also the passion of the true novelist, but which in Vautrin, is an infernal desire. Those whose salvation he claims to achieve are led to death, and one senses that more than once, Balzac trembled before the somber power of this double of himself.[6]

In short, Balzac gives as little information as he can about Vautrin in this opening paragraph, while giving us enough to become captivated. (We will only become fascinated with him at the scene of his arrest). What is really masterful in this description is that Vautrin is a man in disguise and as such Balzac has to describe his disguise but also let us glimpse why he’s disguised. Being a realist writer, Balzac has to give us an impression of reality but he has to hide the character’s reality at the same time. We really question ourselves, (in this game of dechiffrement) of the realism of a portrait of a portrait as Elodie says: “Dans le cas de Vautrin, … il faut décrire la seule apparence et en même temps livrer des indices qui préparent le dévoilement à venir. On s’interrogera donc sur le réalisme de ce portrait de ce portrait et sur sa dimension énigmatique.”[7]

The important traits that Balzac gives us are: the character’s strength, the force of his will, his large hands (and all the locks he can pick with them) and shoulders, his audacity, his seeming omniscience, his overarching knowledge and most particularly his penetrating gaze:

À la manière dont il lançait un jet de salive, il annonçait un sang-froid imperturbable qui ne devait pas le faire reculer devant un crime pour sortir d’une position équivoque. Comme un juge sévère, son œil semblait aller au fond de toutes les questions, de toutes les consciences, de tous les sentiments.[8]

For Elodie this is of outmost importance because “Le regard est analysé comme une voie d’accès vers l’âme; on déchiffre l’homme Vautrin en lisant dans ses yeux..[9]” The eyes are the windows of the soul, they say. In the case of Vautrin we see that his soul is made in the image of his body and vice versa, even better, his body has been made to fit his soul: “Vigueur du corps, de l’esprit et du caractère vont de pair; l’âme de Vautrin est bien chez elle dans le corps de Vautrin, l’une façonnée à dessein, semble-t-il, à le mesure de l’autre.”

It is precisely because of these two facts (the game of dechiffrement and his mysterious soul) that this man captivates us. McCarthy ends her discussion of Vautrin by saying: “The game of recognition that the presentation of Collin-Vautrin-Herrera requires of us, the perspective that it permits us, and the author’s careful design and manipulation of the character’s multilayered personality make of Jacques Collin one of the most fascinating reappearing characters in La Comedie humaine.”[10]

This paper will return to Le Pere Goriot after this example from the play Vautrin which succinctly explains one of the most confusing traits of Vautrin, his homosexuality, which has been discussed too many times to have any relevance here. For the sake of this paper we will just say that Vautrin takes an interest in talented and beautiful men and that this is not necessarily sexual but may also be paternal or both as Freud would later say. In this passage we see two things that we perhaps didn’t fully realize in le Pere Goriot. The first one is that he searches obsessively for purity of heart, and the other is that he takes that as his conscience, whether he does it because he doesn’t have an ounce of either of them, is still left to see.

“You may judge my power from what I am in process of doing for Raoul. Ought he not to be preferred before all? Raoul de Frescas is a young man who has remained pure as an angel in the midst of our mire-pit; he is our conscience; moreover, he is my creation; I am at once his father, his mother, and I desire to be his guiding providence. I, who can never know happiness, still delight in making other people happy. I breath through his lips, I live in his life, his passions are my own; and it is impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of my party? Obey me.”[11]

The last part of the excerpt above goes hand in hand with what Vautrin says to Rastignac in Le Pere Goriot about how to enter society. Vautrin’s life is a war-zone, and he thinks he’s a cannonball or an epidemic:

“Savez-vous comment on fait son chemin ici ? Par l’éclat du génie ou par l’adresse de la corruption. Il faut entrer dans cette masse d’hommes comme un boulet de canon, ou s’y glisser comme une peste. L’honnêteté ne sert à rien.[12]

At last we arrive to the scene where Vautrin is arrested and this is what we see:

“Tout espoir de fuite fut donc interdit à Trompe-la-Mort, sur qui tous les regards s’arrêtèrent irrésistiblement. Le chef alla droit à lui, commença par lui donner sur la tête une tape si violemment appliquée qu’il fit sauter la perruque et rendit à la tête de Collin toute son horreur. Accompagnées de cheveux rouge brique et courts qui leur donnaient un épouvantable caractère de force mêlée de ruse, cette tête et cette face, en harmonie avec le buste, furent intelligemment illuminées comme si les feux de l’enfer les eussent éclairées. Chacun comprit tout Vautrin, son passé, son présent, son avenir, ses doctrines implacables, la religion de son bon plaisir, la royauté que lui donnaient le cynisme de ses pensées, de ses actes, et la force d’une organisation faite à tout. Le sang lui monta au visage, et ses yeux brillèrent comme ceux d’un chat sauvage. Il bondit sur lui-même par un mouvement empreint d’une si féroce énergie, il rugit si bien qu’il arracha des cris de terreur à tous les pensionnaires. A ce geste de lion, et s’appuyant de la clameur générale, les agents tirèrent leurs pistolets. Collin comprit son danger en voyant briller le chien de chaque arme, et donna tout à coup la preuve de la plus haute puissance humaine. Horrible et majestueux spectacle ! sa physionomie présenta un phénomène qui ne peut être comparé qu’à celui de la chaudière pleine de cette vapeur fumeuse qui soulèverait des montagnes, et que dissout en un clin d’oeil une goutte d’eau froide. La goutte d’eau qui froidit sa rage fut une réflexion rapide comme un éclair. Il se mit à sourire et regarda sa perruque.

“Tu n’es pas dans tes jours de politesse,” dit-il au chef de la police de sûreté. Et il tendit ses mains aux gendarmes en les appelant par un signe de tête. “Messieurs les gendarmes, mettez-moi les menottes ou les poucettes. je prends à témoin les personnes présentes que je ne résiste pas.”Un murmure admiratif, arraché par la promptitude avec laquelle la lave et le feu sortirent et rentrèrent dans ce volcan humain, retentit dans la salle.”[13]

It’s such a great scene, and so pivotal to the understanding of Vautrin, that it is necessary to put it here in its entirety. As we can see, it is in this moment that we really see Vautrin for who he is. McCarthy tells us that it is in fact the only scene in all of La Comedie humaine where we see him without any masks or disguises, the only moment where we don’t have to play “le jeu de dechiffrement”: “…it is our first and last glimpse of the actual Jacques Collin. It is a brief and impressive portrayal of the powerful criminal, and it is the only appearance of him undisguised in all of La Comedie humaine.”[14]

Maybe the most important phrase in all the passage is the following where the revelation of who he is, is brought to a climax: “Chacun comprit tout Vautrin, son passé, son présent, son avenir, ses doctrines implacables, la religion de son bon plaisir, la royauté que lui donnaient le cynisme de ses pensées, de ses actes, et la force d’une organisation faite à tout.” [15] Balzac not only means that all the characters in the book understood everything about Vautrin in a brief moment of absolute clarity; he means that we as the readers do the same and that he himself understood everything about Vautrin, only when he wrote this scene.

It is those moments of absolute clarity where someone’s personality and character become so concentrated that we can penetrate into the mysteries of the human race through the actions of a single man. Balzac knew that and that’s why he added just after this passage, this description, in which Vautrin is not a man any more, not even a representation of a certain group of people but the degenerate nation itself, which in its hearth all human sentiments are represented, except guilt. Except guilt! A very important fact to remember when we discuss Vautrin as the hero of capitalism.

…Le bagne avec ses mœurs et son langage, avec ses brusques transitions du plaisant à l’horrible, son épouvantable grandeur, sa familiarité, sa bassesse, fut tout à coup représenté dans cette interpellation et par cet homme, qui ne fut plus un homme, mais le type de toute une nation dégénérée, d’un peuple sauvage et logique, brutal et souple. En un moment Collin devint un poème infernal où se peignirent tous les sentiments humains, moins un seul, celui du repentir. Son regard était celui de l’archange déchu qui veut toujours la guerre.[16]

To top it all off, in the first passage Balzac writes: “Collin comprit son danger en voyant briller le chien de chaque arme, et donna tout à coup la preuve de la plus haute puissance humaine.”[17] He gave proof of his possession of a power of the highest order, says one translator but it’s closer to the truth if one says he gave proof of the highest human power ever seen. Vautrin is indeed the most powerful human that has ever existed in La Comedie Humaine. That is why Victor Hugo will later compare him to God and Jesus Christ. He will say he’s almost the son of god become man. Or is he the fallen archangel, Lucifer?

Nevertheless Honore de Balzac was a realist and he took this Son of God from real life, he was inspired by Eugène François Vidocq (1775-1857) a criminal who became chief of the Paris police. Vidocq became very famous in France after the publication of his memoires in the winter of 1828. We know for sure from a footnote in the 6^th edition of Le Pere Goriot by P.G Castex that Levasseur mentioned the 4 volumes of Vidocq’s Memoires in a receipt presented to Balazc on the 10^th of February of 1830, and as such we know that Balzac read them. He also met him in 1834 and had dinner with him a couple of times and surely learned a lot from his mistress Madame de Berny.[18]

Here follows some facts from Vidocq’s life. He was born in Arras in 1775 to a baker: at 13 he already flourished his sword with extraordinary ability, and those who were comrades-in-arms gave him the only education he would ever receive. He ended up stealing 2,000 francs from his parents and leaving hem forever. This is the description of his first crime where it is surprising that he almost seems honest, and can’t bear to be weak in any way; Vautrin is describes in eerily similar terms when they arrest him. Vidocq says in his own words:

“Le comptoir etait ferme; je fus presque satisfait de rencontrer cet ob-

stacle. Cette fois, je me rappelai l’amour que me portait ma mere, non

plus pour me promettre l’impunite, mais pour eprouver un commence-

ment de remords. J’allais me retirer, Poyant me retint, son eloquence

inferale me fit rougir de ce qu’il appelait ma faiblesse…” [19]

Later in his memories Vidocq describes almost exactly the situation in Le pere Goriot where Vautrin wishes Rastignac to marry Victorine Taillefer so both of them can take advantage of her money, but in this scene Vidocq plays the role of Rastignac; it reminds us of the fact that Vautrin tells Rastignac that he’s been in the same position as he is now.

“Ce quadragenaire a l’habitude des femmes, il appuie ha-

bilement le jeune charmeur, et se prepare a tirer parti de la toquade de

l’hotesse. Il croit possible de les marier. C’est alors a peu pres la scene

dans laquelle Vautrin pousse Rastignac a epouser Victorine Taillefer,

avec cette difference que Vidocq joue le role de Rastignac, et non celui

du tentateur. Vidocq avance quelques objections, dont l’une au moins

ne manque pas de force: il est deja marie, bien qu’il ait quitte sa femme

depuis longtemps.”[20]

If we had kept reading, we would find that the old man, in fact, convinces Vidocq. He marries her and takes the money from this woman just as Vautrin wants Rastignac to do. The similarities are very evident although of course Balzac has inflicted some of his genius into every character, as Baudelaire would say. If genius is indeed what Balzac has, who other, than another genius, in this case Victor Hugo, to tell us why the creation of Vautrin is the work of a Master.

Again, it’s necessary to put the whole quote here, since it’s Victor Hugo and because he says some pretty impressive things. He mention the Son of God become man again and the myth of paternalism that surrounds Vautrin.

“Vautrin est le grand desherite de l’amour, le grand maudit du devouement. Vautrin est ce qu’il y a de plus tendre, dans ce qu’il y a de plus implacable, un coeur de pere sous une casaque de galerien. Il a ete rejete par la loi, il s’en venge en remplacant la nature. Il est raye du nombre des hommes, il s’en console en ajoutant au nombre des peres. Vautrin c’est le paria fait pere; c’est presque autant que le Dieu fait homme.”

The writer goes on to say the following which will become very important in the context of seeing Vautrin not as a criminal but as a savior which is always the case when one talks about capitalism’s hero, especially in the context of Ayn Rand.

“Faut-il donc croire que la Voix venue de l’Au-dela accepte l’homo-

sexualite de Vautrin comme un “remplacement” de la nature, et qu’en

mettant la main sur Lucien de Rubempre, apres avoir manque Ras-

tignac, l’ancien forcat s’eleve au niveau de Jesus-Christ? Pensee

sacrilege pour les croyants, absurdite pour les autres. “[21]

How can it be that Vautrin becomes a savior? Reboussin expresses it so well when he says in the last quote: “Pensee sacrilege pour les croyants, absurdite pour les autres.” Nevertheless, in one branch of philosophy called Objectivism, that of Ayn Rand, his character, his passions and his morals conform to what she refers to as a man and even more as the capitalist par excellence.

She would argue that Vautrin is the only moral character in the book, and as such he’s precisely the embodiment of capitalism’s hero. His lucidity and success come not only from the understanding of the principles (whether good or bad) that society proclaims it follows and the ones it really does, but also from the understanding that to be successful in a capitalist society you have to be selfish.

His morality stems from the fact that only a code of morality, according to Rand, accepted by choice is a code of morality:

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice—and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.[22]

Vautrin not only has made the choice long ago in his life and as such he became the embodiment of that morality he’s also a very rational being. As we can remember form one of the first quotes where we first encounter Vautrin in Le Pere Goriot, Balazc describes him as that archetype of rationality, he describes him as a judge: “Comme un juge sévère, son œil semblait aller au fond de toutes les questions, de toutes les consciences, de tous les sentiments.”

WORKS CITED

BOOKS

1- McCarthy, Mary Susan. Balzac and his Reader. 1949. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1982. (115-129)

2- Kanes, Martin. Critical Essays on Honore de Balzac. 1990. Boston: G.K. Hall & CO, 1990. (Beguin 124-125) (Van Rossum-Guyon 196-197)

3- Balzac , Honore de. Vautrin: The works of Honore de Balzac The Dramas Vol. XXXIV. 1901. Philadelphia: Avil Publishing Company, 1901. Translated and edited by J.Walker McSpadden. Pages 3-154.

4- Balzac, Honore de. Old Goriot. 38. England: Penguin Books, 1951.

ARTICLES

1- “ Balzac and Dostoevskij: Ethics and Eschatology” Joel Hunt The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 1958), pp. 307-324 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

2- ”Vautrin, Vidocq et Valjean” Marcel Reboussin The French Review, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Mar., 1969), pp. 524-532

3- Paper delivered by Ayn Rand at the University of Wisconsin Symposium on “Ethics in Our Time” in Madison, Wisconsin, on February 9, 1961. Taken on 3-12-09 from : http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand_the_objectivist_ethics

4- “The Criminal-King in a 19th Century Novel” Anthony Blunt Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Jan., 1938), pp. 248-249 Published by: The Warburg Institute

5- Baran James, John. “Predators and Parasites in ‘Le Pere Goriot’ Symposium 47.n.1 (Spring 1993) 3(13). Academic OneFile. Gale Boston Univ, Mugar Memorial Library, 5 mar 2009.

6- Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), Le Père Goriot (1835) Taken from http://www.etudes-litteraires.com/balzac.php on 03-23-09

7- Rastignac-Telemaque: The Epic Scale in “Le Pere Goriot” Alexander Fischler The Modern Language Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (Oct., 1968), pp. 840-848 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association

8- Le portrait de Vautrin. Taken from http://www.bacdefrancais.net/pere_portrait.html on March 23, 2009

[24] Kanes, Martin. Critical Essays on Honore de Balzac. 1990. Boston: G.K. Hall & CO, 1990. (Beguin 124-125) (Van Rossum-Guyon 196-197)