From Gobseck's Chamber to Derville's Chambers: retention in Balzac's Gobseck.(rooms and closets in Honore de Balzac's La Comedie humaine)

A ceux qui avaient Pair degoute, il disait: "Mais c'est de l'or! C'est de l'or!"--Flaubert, Bouvard et Pecuchet

The general context of this article is an interest in secret rooms and closets in Balzac's La Comedie humaine. (1) Its specific point of departure is a recently published text in which Roland Barthes, at his inventive and idiosyncratic best, briefly explores la chambre as a symbolic space that inscribes the relation of the human body to the world (84-90). Barthes's suggestive dossier (initially part of a 1977 cours at the College de France) sets out from the lieu total of the maison and passes through the divided-off space of the chambre conjugale. Initially, it was Barthes's throwaway claim that the chambre conjugale conflates property, treasure, sexuality, and secrecy (psychoanalytically in the scene primitive, mythically in Bluebeard's Chamber) (88), that sent me scurrying to the text of Gobseck. I wanted to relook at Balzac's detailed descriptions of the split conjugal chamber of the Restaud menage: the adulterous, perfumed space of Anastasie's voluptuous bedroom, the disorderly squalor of the sick chamber of her once fastidious husband. The antechamber of Restaud's bedroom is the setting for two melodramatic, pseudo-primal scenes of violent conjugal exchange. In the first, appropriately played out before the eyes of their son Ernest, the skeletal, dying Restaud emerges almost naked from his room to curse Anastasie and kick her to the ground. In the second, it is Derville and Gobseck who burst onto the stage of Anastasie's frenzied and destructive revenge: "Quel spectacle s'offrit a nos regards!" (2: l006). Anastasie has just ransacked the death chamber for papers concerning Restaud's fortune and the mark of her foot is visible on his pillow (his corpse has been tossed aside like the empty envelopes that litter the floor). While the "scene du matin" is reconstructed after the fact by Derville and Gobseck, neither of whom was present, the two men gain access to its midnight denouement thanks to Gobseck's action of forcibly casting aside the child who stands guard for his mother at the door. But it is Derville who evokes both scenes in his vivid oral narrative, and who rounds off the second with an ironically conjugal vision of Anastasie--she has unwittingly burned her children's titres de propriete--"assise aupres du lit de son mari et pleurant a chaudes larmes" (1008).

However, conjugality is rarely an issue in Barthes's cours, which explores literary representations of restricted social groupings where a structured whole permits the independent "rhythm" of its parts; as a parti pris he brackets out both large groups and the couple. The reading of Gobseck proposed in this article derives from Barthes's sustained focus on the psychic and anthropological meanings attaching to the chambre individuelle, the literal or metaphorical cell, a space of self-enclosure and willed isolation (spiritual or neurotic), that establishes itself as the ultimate "lieu de fantasmatisation, en tant qu'il est protege; ce qui est soustrait a la surveillance" (89). The private room is the emblematic figure of what Barthes, establishing a paradigm with the vivre ensemble, calls the vivre seul; its emblematic text, which emerges more and more forcefully as the cours progresses, is Gide's La Sequestree de Poitiers: "le texte de la marginalite absolue, d'un Vivre-Seul d'un metal si intense qu'il a pris en echarpe les aspects clandestins et aigus du Vivre-avec" (183). (2) Published in 1930, La Sequestree de Poitiers is Gide's compelling assemblage of the documents (largely police reports) surrounding a real-life fait divers: the discovery in 1901 that the 51-year old woman Gide calls Melanie Bastian has been sequestered for 25 years in a tightly sealed, stinking bedroom in a respectable bourgeois immeuble in Poitiers. She has been living in an objectively appalling state of filthiness: urinating and defecating in the bed she never leaves, the mattress rotten and the sheets never changed, the room never cleaned, insects and vermin everywhere; Melanie herself, with her horribly matted hair, is encased, as it were, in a sort of crust made up of excrement and the rotting remains of meat, fish, vegetables, bread, and oyster shells. In an apparent paradox, Melanie has been well nourished by her mother, and regularly visited by her brother; both mother and brother, when arrested by the police, insist that this sequestation and life style have been chosen by Melanie herself. Melanie is taken to hospital, cleaned up, toilet trained and to some extent "normalized," yet remains nostalgic for what is established, in her idiosyncratic discourse, as a mythical place: her "chere petite grotte," to which she has even given an affectionate name, her "cher grand fond Malampia." Throughout his cours, Barthes returns insistently to the case of Melanie, notably in sections on the themes of la cloture (93-99) and la salete (167-70), intrigued as he is by the collective "folie de sequestration" of this family, a folie which combines claustrophilie--Barthes's neologism (3)--with attraction to dirt, the latter encapsulated by the brother's evident sexual enjoyment of the sight and smell of excrement.

Melanie's room is a fascinating point of reference for the sick chamber in which Balzac's Restaud, "jadis riche et recherche dans ses gouts," shuts himself away, takes to his bed, refuses to have his room cleaned, and rejects "route espece de soin," including having his bed made (l003). Thus he lies, apathetically, the shutters tightly closed, his unkempt hair extraordinarily long, amongst the dust and spiders' webs, the general decay best illustrated by the untidy chaos of the material trappings of illness: "des fioles vides ou pleines, presque toutes sales; du linge epars, des assiettes brisees, une bassinoire ouverte devant le feu, une baignoire encore pleine d'eau minerale" (1003). If human waste is missing from this description, arguably it is connoted. The same might be said of Derville's depiction of the stinking and rotting foodstuffs that have accumulated in the next-door room during Gobseck's final illness: "des pates pourris, une foule de comestibles de tout genre et meme des coquillages, des poissons qui avaient de la barbe et dont les diverses ...