“She will always be a flower,” were his words. We might add—a unique flower which does not reproduce its kind, a flower such as Seraphita herself had plucked for Minna on the mountain top, “a real miracle developed under the breath of the angels.” In the midst of the discussion which ensues, David, the aged servitor, rushes in to announce that Seraphita is wrestling with the demons.
The four of them set out for the Swedish castle wherein Seraphita dwells. Through the window they see her standing in prayer. Suddenly she vanishes before their eyes, to the accompaniment of celestial strains. This astonishing vision each one interprets differently: Pastor Becker felt doubt, Minna adoration, Wilfrid desire.
At this point the narrative is interrupted, seemingly to give a more detailed description of Wilfrid’s character and of the genesis of his love for Seraphita. Actually, the description is a device by which Balzac permits himself to reveal the nature of his own secret struggles.
After remarking that Wilfrid was in the prime of life (practically Balzac’s own age at the time), that he had studied the laws of humanity, had grown pale over books (“which are human actions in death”), he describes him as a Cain to whom hope yet remained and who seemed to be seeking absolution at the ends of the earth. (“Minna suspected the slave of glory in this man.”) Is this an elliptic allusion to the murder of his real self, which he describes in Louis Lambert?
Was Balzac alluding to a love which he had killed, in order to walk the path of fame and glory? At any rate, the two pages which follow are to be read like palimpsest. Here is the tenor of it. . . . “He had escaped from social life from necessity, as a criminal flies to the cloister.
Remorse, the virtue of the weak, could not touch him. Remorse is impotence; it will sin again. Only repentance is strong; it can end everything. But Wilfrid, in traveling through the world, which he had made his sanctuary, nowhere found balm for his wounds; nowhere had he found a nature to which he could attach himself. Despair had dried up in him the well-spring of desire.
His was one of those spirits which, having come to a conflict with passion, have proved themselves the stronger, and so have nothing left to clutch in their talons; spirits which, the opportunity failing them for putting themselves at the head of their peers to trample a whole people under their horses’ hoofs, would pay the price of a dreadful martyrdom for the gift of a faith to be wrecked upon; like lofty rocks waiting for the touch of a staff which never comes, to enable them to shed springs of running water.” It is difficult to imagine anything more naked and incriminating than these words which, I feel certain, Balzac meant to apply to himself.
But, as if this were not sufficient, goaded by an impulse to unburden himself, he continues: “Having drained the cup of earthly love he [Wilfrid] now saw the cup of election.” Speaking retrospectively, both in the narrative and in his own soul, Balzac rushes on: “He went to tell her his life, to display the greatness of his soul by the greatness of his sins, to show her the ruins in his desert.”
He stresses the fact that on this day when Wilfrid first saw Seraphita “the meeting wiped out all memories of his past life.” (Did he not mean past lives?) At the very moment, so the narrative runs, when he is about to tell her of his life, of his great love, “a gulf opened before him in which the words of his delirium were lost, and whence a voice came up that transformed him: he was a boy again, a boy of sixteen.”
In these all-transparent words Balzac fuses the two highest moments of ecstasy which he had known; the one, when he was a boy at the College of Vendôme and most assuredly saw and spoke with the angels, the other at the moment—or perhaps just prior to the moment—when he met Madame Hanska.
It was on September 26, 1833, that he met the latter for the first time, at Neufchâtel. In December of that year, as I remarked previously, he began the writing of Seraphita. Throughout his whole life, it is said by those competent to know, he experienced only a few weeks of real happiness.
The description of Wilfrid’s emotions on meeting Seraphita is undoubtedly a transcript of Balzac’s own feelings on meeting Madame Hanska, a record of his joy and aspirations at that moment. In the woman whom he struggles seventeen years to attach himself to he gave human form to the cup of election whose life-giving waters he had already tasted. In her he sought the companion whom he hoped would accompany him to the realm of Light.
The brief union with Madame Hanska, the intensity of the experience, revived the memory of youthful visions and ecstasies; the angel in him awoke and spake. He re-became, for a spell, the Louis Lambert whom he had parted from in his youth, whose like he was never again to find since he had chosen the earthly sanctuary in which the real self was absent. “Who has not known,” he says of Wilfrid, “what it is to become young and pure again [Wilfrid is only thirty-six] after growing cold with age and foul with impurities?
Wilfrid loved suddenly, as he had never loved; he loved in secret, with faith and awe and hidden frenzies.” Madame Hanska was rather a frail, defective human vessel, as we know, but for Balzac she was the being who served to keep the inner flame alight.
She it was, I am inclined to think, who preserved him from that sorrowful fate he had apportioned to Louis Lambert. It was she who organized his madness, who kept him rooted to the earth. But under the spell of this consuming love, the artist in him, which was in danger of being snuffed out, transformed the earth into a living creature, and in the heart of this animal the earth he lived and moved and had his being.
Here, about the middle of the book, comes the fourth chapter which, like the fourth everywhere, is the crux in which the rock is metamorphosed into the waters of life. Addressed primarily to Pastor Becker, the symbol of doubt, Seraphita’s words are hurled like thunderbolts.
Pastor Becker is Europe, that Europe which, as we read subsequently, “can believe in no one but Him who will trample her under foot.” As cruel and merciless to the man of genius as to the man in the street, Europe, Balzac realized, must perish.
What follows is prophetic of the dawn of a new day, a day in which not only the boundaries of nationalism will be dissolved, but every barrier which separates man from man and man from God. “What does it signify,” says Seraphita, “which way the worlds are moving if the Being who guides them is proved to be absurd? . . .
Your scepticism permeates from above downwards . . . Your doubts include everything, the end as well as the means. . . . Everything is God. Either we are God, or God is not!” There is plenty in this chapter for the sceptic to sneer at, for the learned man to mock, for the scientific man to scorn, for the conqueror to despise, for the ideologist to crack with his sharp teeth, but how will these reply to Seraphita’s challenge? “Old Man! this is the sum-total of your science and your long meditations.”
Balzac was privileged to witness the downfall of Napoleon; he was contemporaneous with Goethe, “the last man of Europe”; he was esteemed by the Apocalyptic writer of the century, Dostoievski. He saw the end of Europe, which has yet to be played out dramatically, but he had also a vision of the world to come, a world in which there would be order, an order imposed from above where all action has its inception.
The tremendous fear which now paralyzes the nations of the world is nothing to the frenzy which will come when the present disorder gives way to chaos. Only a man like Balzac, who anchored himself in the very heart of chaos, could appreciate the meaning of “order.” This order he gives us, in progressive hierarchies, throughout the remainder of the book.
It is an order which is founded on faith. “There is a being,” says Seraphita, “who both believes and sees, who has knowledge and power, who loves, prays and waits . . . he both listens and replies.
In his eyes scepticism is not impiety . . . it is a stage of transition whence a man must go forward towards the light, or back into darkness.” How better characterize the times than by these prophetic words? “There is a supreme science,” she continues, “of which some men—too late—get a glimpse, though they dare not own it.
These men perceive the necessity for considering all bodies, not merely from the point of view of their mathematical properties, but also from that of their whole relations and occult affinities.” What more is there to be said?
Wilfrid returns home, appalled at finding his world in ruins; Pastor Becker returns
