The Law and Lawyers of Balzac
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baptism of the children of his brain as the Human Comedy was justified.
tion, but many of them carry on the main action of the story. There are
Everything is there. “Balzac was born on May 20, 1799.
altogether some fifteen hundred and
He died August 18, 1850. Some authori ties say it was August 17th, but all
that approximately eight per cent of his male characters have something to
agree that he is dead. At this time it makes very little difference to Balzac, and still less to us, which is correct.
do with the law. His books are crammed with legal terms and references. The Code was at his finger ends; and as modesty can hardly be called the be setting sin of us common lawyers, it will do us no harm to read these novels as a study in comparative law as well as comparative morals. . . “Balzac, in his general views of law and lawyers, more nearly resembled Scott than Dickens. Like Scott he was a well-read lawyer, and was impartial in
In his youth the great Revolution was recent history, and he saw disorganized society as it was rearranged by the First
Consul and the Emperor. As he matured he witnessed the reactionary monarchies of Louis XVIII, Charles X and Louis Philippe. His father was a lawyer, and
obedient to the paternal wishes he studied law, first for eighteen months with M. de Guillonet-Merville, an ardent Royalist, and for an equal period with a notary named Passez. Though duly qualified he never practised either as
lawyer or notary. The dry details of the profession were revolting to him. You cannot harness Pegasus to a plow. He said to his sister, ‘I should become
like the horse of a treadmill which does his thirty or forty rounds an hour, eats, drinks and sleeps by rule, and they call
that living!’
But his time was not
wasted, for it is doubtful if any writer,
not even excepting Scott, found his legal knowledge more useful. "His accurate perception and marvel ous memory enabled him to reproduce in imperishable words the men whom
he had met and the Code which he had studied. I have counted the number of characters in Cerfberr and Christophe's Compendium of the Human Comedy who are connected with the law. There are twenty-nine judges and magistrates, twenty-three barristers, fourteen attor
neys, twenty-four notaries and twenty
forty men in the Human Comedy, so
his treatment of the profession. He could separate the evil from the good, and could contrast the upright and learned judge and lawyer with the trickster and the incompetent. Dickens, on the other hand, could see no good in either the science of the law or in the men who practised it. He scarcely mentioned law except in terms of contempt, and nearly all his lawyers are caricatures. With Balzac, I say, it was different, though,
to be sure, his standard—perhaps it was the French standard —of profes sional ethics is not quite the same as our own. . . “Balzac’s pictures of lawyers and their ofiices abound in his novels, all charac
terized by his minute attention to de tail. In ‘Cousin Pons' he thus described the shyster Fraisier and his offices: ‘The room was a complete picture of a third-rate solicitor’s ofiice,
with
the
stained wooden cases, the letter files so old that they had grown beards, the red tape dangling limp and dejected,
eight office clerks, in all one hundred
the pasteboard boxes covered with the gambols of mice, the dirty floor, the ceil
and eighteen. Not all prominent, to be sure, some have only a passing men
ing yellow with smoke.’ There is a similar uninviting description of Clapa
