Emma Dent, "Surface, Depth, and the Materiality of Language in Balzac’s *Domestic Peace*"

      The narrator of Balzac’s Domestic Peace wastes little time, making clear that the “incident” he now commits to print “took place towards the end of the month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleon’s fugitive empire attained the apogee of its splendor.”  The narrator not only quickly isolates the specific year in which these as-yet-unknown events unfolded, but also encapsulates the decadent spirit of the period in question, one marked by an “unbridled mania for everything glittering.”  Yet despite his seemingly confessional tone, our guide decidedly conceals as much as he evokes in these opening paragraphs.  Who exactly is this person speaking to us, in whom we must place at least a minim of trust?  The obvious choice is Balzac himself, particularly given that the story is dedicated to his niece Valentine Surville.  However, this concrete connection to the “real world” does not necessarily confirm Balzac as the narrator. 

The ambiguity of the circumstances surrounding the tale extends beyond the narrator’s identity.  The temporal relationship between Domestic Peace’s enigmatic chronicler and the events he records remains unknown until the story’s end.  Punctuated with the stamp of “July, 1829,” the conclusion resolves the issue of historical vantage, yet other questions linger unanswered.  Shrouded still from readers are the nature of the narrator’s motives and his position within “the incidents of the little imbroglio.”  Readers thus enter into a world of uncertainties, at once armed with information and disarmed by its absence. This immediate but subtle disarmament, however, will prove to be somewhat instructive as we fully enter the narrative’s action.  Indeed, it triggers a kind of necessary vigilance in the reader, suggesting that one’s absorption of the events and their constituent players would benefit from sharp, even skeptical, eyes. 

Tellingly, it is the mention of those vital organs that fully transports us from the narrator’s prefatory remarks to the episode itself.  “Turn your eyes a little towards the pedestal supporting that candelabrum,” demands an unknown voice introduced simply as the “first speaker.”  This request is as much for the speaker’s partner in conversation as it is for the reader.  Offered an unspoken invitation, the reader becomes yet another attendee at Comte de Gondreville’s luxurious fete.  As participant-observers in this affair, graced by the likes of Baron de la Roche-Hugon, Colonel Montcornet, Madame de Vaudremont, and Comte and Comtesse de Soulanges, our need for perceptual vigilance becomes essential. 

In The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, scholar Peter Brooks writes that “there is always a moment in Balzac’s descriptions of the world where the eye’s photographic registration of objects yields to the mind’s effort to pierce surface, to interrogate appearances” (2).  Indeed, Domestic Peace registers the play of surface and depth to which Brooks points.  For the ball at the center of the story is both exactly what it professes to be - a frivolous affair of mingling, drinking, and dancing – and much more.  In navigating the labyrinthine interactions of the story’s principal players, we come to view the soiree also as an engagement pregnant with sobering consequences: extramarital liaisons exposed, marriages on the brink of dissolution, fortunes secured and lost, and reputations ruined.  In Balzac’s hands, the Comte’s social gathering is really a theatre of social intrigue, one whose actors and actions require the discriminating attention of readers in order to divine.

 Yet as we mine Balzac’s work à la Brooks, we cannot help but marvel at the sheer materiality of the writer’s language.  Domestic Peace is a veritable feast of surfaces, a sharp-edged prism of shifting reflections (appearances, gestures, etc…) not unlike the sparkling diamond whose possession changes hands over the course of the evening.  Throughout the story, Balzac consistently draws our attention to the superficial, palpably rendering the exteriors of objects and of people, vis-à-vis facial expressions and body language.  Although positioned underneath a “huge candelabrum,” the “little blue lady” whose presence ignites the curiosity of Colonel and Martial remains obscured at the story’s opening.  Thus, while she rests near the candelabrum’s flame, her identity as the Comtesse de Soulanges has yet to fully, as one might say, “come to light.”  In this instance, Balzac suggests that light does not always provide clarity, neither for the readers nor for the characters.  In other moments, however, light illumines that which the actors most wish to camouflage: emotions, secrets, motives, etc…  At one point, Balzac writes: “the chandeliers and the flambeaux on the chimney-shelf shed such a flood of light on the two friends that their faces, strongly illuminated, failed, in spite of their diplomatic discretion, to conceal the faint expression of their feelings either from the keen-sighted countess or the artless stranger.”  Here, light not only animates the two men’s physical forms, but also makes public the nature of their clandestine conversation to potentially deleterious effects. 

Immediately following this aforementioned description, the narrator offers commentary of the play-by-play he has just provided, observing: “this espionage of people's thoughts is perhaps to idle persons one of the pleasures they find in society, while numbers of disappointed numskulls are bored there without daring to own it.”  It is in such moments of biting editorialization – a frequent occurrence in Domestic Peace - that the kind of interrogation of appearances advocated by Brooks finds force.  Balzac sketches the cunning Madame de Lansac as a woman who “coated her cheeks so thickly with rouge that the wrinkles were scarcely visible.”  In doing so, the writer endows her surface, that is to say her physical appearance, with much deeper import.  Madame de Lansac’s exaggerated maquillage suggests a kind of war paint, and this connection is made all the more convincing by Balzac’s earlier use of the expression “engage battle” to describe her social machinations at the ball.  It is, perhaps, also significant that Madame de Lansac’s preferred weapon in this “battle” is expression itself, in the form of a sly, “sardonic glance.” 

In Domestic Peace, gestures are seldom automatic, looks are rarely without intention, and appearances both reveal and obfuscate.  As readers, we are called to be as mindful of the superficial – a furtive glance or a flushed cheek – as the characters themselves.  Literary scholar Peter Brooks argues that Balzac’s evocation of such social interactions “tend toward intense, excessive representations of life which strip the façade of manners to reveal the essential conflicts at work – moments of symbolic confrontation which fully articulate the terms of the drama” (3).  But we are only able to notice and then plumb the depths of these surfaces - to truly penetrate this “façade of manners” – because Balzac renders them so exaggeratedly, richly material in language.