As is always done with great writers, historians have searched in the novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) for possible clues about his sexuality and his love life.
We must thank them for the effort, because it is gigantic. Balzac wrote non-stop, sometimes up to fifteen hours a day, and at breakneck speed. One of his biographers calculated the equivalent of 33 words per minute on a typewriter.
He had on his hands the enormous task of making a total portrait of French society at the beginning of the 19th century. As Benito Pérez Galdós – another realist – would later do, he took the spectacle of the common people and returned it artistically transformed.
That there are real people in his fictions is evident. For example, in Papa Goriot (1835), where he places the father in focus. To most biographers, it is an emulation of his fatherly treatment of his secretary and protégé, Jules Sandeau.
And what about their loves? They are there, we know it because he said it himself. Eugenia Grandet (1833) is dedicated to Maria du Fresnay, a young writer with whom he had an illegitimate daughter. Unhappily married to a man twenty years her senior, her life was the stuff of novels. In fact, the characters in that story are largely members of the Fresnay family.
Then there is Ewelina Ha?ska, who, in her words, was the “object of my sweetest dreams”. She was also married, to a Polish nobleman who owned 85 km² of land and 3,000 serfs (in the Russian Empire serfdom existed until 1861).
Partly because she was impressed by her portrayal of femininity in Les Chouans (1829) and partly because she was terribly bored, in 1832 she wrote him an anonymous letter. At first she wasn’t looking for an answer, it was a hobby, but she ended up getting curious. Continuing with her mischief, she told him that if she wanted to answer him, she should publish an ad in La Quotidienne with an agreed pseudonym.
Thus began an intense epistolary relationship. They talked about literature, religion, love…, about things that took her out of her isolation in the castle of Wierzchownia (today in Ukraine). Thinking that she influenced the work of a great writer, moreover, she Ewelina felt important. He, for her part, was inflamed thinking of her. Ewelina was a beauty.
They had several meetings of a few hours, most of the time, taking advantage of the family trips that she made through Europe. The idiot of her husband had Balzac for a friend; she believed that she followed them through the hotels to visit him. Of course, Ewelina is all over the Human Comedy: at La Fosseuse, Modeste Mignon, Ursule Mirouët, Adeline Hulot, Eugénie Grandet…
Until here the women, because there is also Vautrin. He is a big man with a thick neck, broad shoulders and thick torso, an evil character who dedicates himself to corrupting handsome teenagers.
The candor of the critics of the time was surprising, as they did not see that the cigar offered to the young Lucien in Lost Illusions (1837) –the one with which Oscar Wilde fell in love– is what it seems. The boy resists, but in the end he takes the money, says “Father, I am yours”, and gets into his buggy.
Did he portray himself in one of his most abject characters? The physical resemblance is evident, and Honoré was also a tutor to young boys; always beautiful, as if he chose them that way. In the case of Jules Sandeau, there are those who, like Herbert James Hunt, Balzac’s translator, have wanted to intuit a relationship.
But, according to Eugen Weber, that theory ignores the long tradition of French writers surrounding themselves with would-be writers who, in exchange for patronage, allowed themselves to be exploited. In principle, only labor.
On the other hand, the fact that there are homosexuals in his novels tells us very little. There are them for the same reason that there are transvestites and prostitutes, devotees and meapilas: because it was about portraying the whole of society. Balzac himself said it: “I am not deep”, but “yes, very wide”.
What is certain is that he was a womanizer who had several mistresses and perhaps the occasional illegitimate child, in addition to Marie-Caroline du Fresnay. Yes, Ewelina played with his feelings and she didn’t marry him until she knew she was dying, but she was faithful to him, which Balzac was not.
Anyway, his novels can reveal certain things about his love life, but you have to take them with reservations. We will not find out if she knew the “third sex” –to use Balzac’s euphemism–, but some of his phrases will help us to glimpse what he thought about relationships with women.
