An apprenticeship to power: Balzac's prologue to "About Catherine De Medici"

Balzac's "About Catherine De Medici" (first titled "Catherine De Medici Explained") -- a passionately-argued defense of the widely villified Queen -- begins with a political philosophic essay in defense of Royal and Church authority. An interesting starting-point for considering the social politics of the "Comedie Humaine" as a whole and also Balzac's relation to Dumas and the attitude of both toward the Revoutionary and Napoleonic periods. Dumas' own novel of Catherine and her daughter Marie ("Queen Margot") appeared just two years later and did not partake of Balzac's revisionist royalism.

"Historians are privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs, exactly as most of the newspapers of the day express nothing but the opinions of their readers."

Balzac's Torryism:

-- "Liberty -- no, but liberties -- yes; well-defined and circumscribed liberties. This is in the nature of things."

-- On the Calvinist agenda for reform: "The outcome of free-will, religious liberty, and political liberty (note, this does not mean civil liberty) is France as we now see it. And what is France in 1840? A country exclusively absorbed in material interests, devoid of patriotism; where authority is powerless; where electoral rights, the fruit of freewill and political liberty, raise none but mediocrities; where brute force is necessary to oppose the violence of the populace; where discussion, brought to bear on the smallest matter, checks every action of the body politic; and where individualism -- the odious result of the infinite subdivision of property, which destroys family cohesion -- will devour everything, even the nation."

-- "Every power, whether legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when it is attacked; but strange to say, while the people is heroic when it is triumphs over the nobility, the authorities are murderers when they oppose the people! . . . The massacres of the Revolution are the reply to the massacre of Saint-Bartholomew."

-- "No one suspects how greatly printing has helped to give body both to the envy which attends persons in high places, and to the popular irony which sums up the converse view of every great historical fact." [Balzac goes on to complain here of Shakespeare's comic portrait of the apparently heroic and quite continent Sir John Falstaff]

-- "The power of the masses is accountable to no one; the power of one is obliged to account to its subjects, great and small alike."

-- "Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established."

[Reading all the above, one sees it is not by whim that Balzac added the "de" to his name as part of his self-creation as a writer]

Catherine De Medici, Balzac writes, weilded "the most dangerous but surest of political weapons -- Craft."

Catherine's chilling "Italian" political philosophy in story of her response to her son Henry III's announcement of his execution of a member of the rival House of Lorraine: "Well cut, my son. Now you must sew-up again" [that is: buy the Lorraine back into the political system]

Among the methods used by Catherine to counteract Henry III's homosexuality is "a supper to nude women" given in a royal banquet hall when he is being welcomed back from Poland to assume the French throne. Balzac, who admiringly assesses Catherine's reign as a "manly rule" states that her attempts to reform her son failed and that, politically speaking, the Valois dynasty died with her.

Balzac backtracks to discuss Catherine's formative years in Medici Florence and as a royal wife in the Valois court:

Balzac suggests one highly formative experience of Catherine was being caught-up, as a 9 year old orphan, in a siege by Florentine republicans and threatened, by Castiglione, no less, with being turned-over to the soldiers. "All revolutions of the populace," Balzac notes dryly, "are alike."

A side-effect of Renaissance Italy's surfeit of talent and genius: "When men are so great, they are not afraid to confess their weakness; hence, no doubt, this golden age for bastards."

Establishing the political parameters of Catherine's era, Balzac sketches a time when the murder of nobles and Popes alike was commonplace. Poisoning was a daily threat: "royal personages had their meals served to them in padlocked boxes of which they had the key."

Balzac approvingly quotes Spinoza on political succession: a new King "must confirm the maxims of him whose place he fills, and walk in the same ways of government."

Upon her unfaithful husband's (Henry II) death, Catherine begins a power struggle on behalf of her son and also takes a lover. Her political rivals contest both attempts to establish herself, seizing the army and leadership of the clergy and forcing her to send her lover to the Bastille.

"Such," Balzac writes, "was this woman's apprenticeship to the exercise of power."
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The orphan boy "Wart," who will become King Arthur grows up in the shadow of Sir Ector's legitimate son and heir, the easily-bored and prematurely pompous, but essentially good-hearted Kay. The boys are "educated" in the ways of rural gentry: "Mondays and Fridays, tilting and horsemanship; Tuesdays, hawking; Wednesdays, fencing; Thursdays, archery; Saturdays, the theory of chivalry, with the proper measures to be blown on all occasions, terminology of the chase and hunting etiquette." Sir Ector is concerned that the boys will soon need a more formal tutor.

After a night on his own in the forest (seeking to recover the goshawk Cully lost by Kay's carelessness) Wart encounters his first questing knight, Sir Pellinore, and then finds his own peculiar tutor -- the magician Merlyn, who stares at the boy "with a kind of unwinking and benevolent curiosity." Merlyn is living backwards in time and his rustic home includes everything from taxidermied and live animals to weapons that "would not be invented for half a thousand years" to a set of the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. An owl, Archimedes by name, perches in Merlyn's conical hat, dropping its feces onto the magician's zodiac-embroidered robe.

[In Wart's easy acceptance of Merlyn's disheveled eccentricity, one sees perhaps a self-portrait of the White of "The Goshawk," whose Medieval hawking piqued the curiosity of local boys].

Merlyn gives Wart breakfast -- among his tableware is a walking mustard pot that, the magician complains, "is inclined to give itself airs" -- and the dazzled boy asks: "Would you mind if I asked you a question?" To which Merlyn, foreshadowing the teacher/student relationship to come, replies: "It is what I am for."








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