Vautrin's Advice

For a few magical years, being a lawyer seemed like a cool profession.  You  could make some big bucks, play with nice grownups and even stand  chance to score with the ladies (as we then called them, if memory serves).  I remember one of them being featured in a commercial for Scotch.

Somehow all that  has passed away.  "Like doing homework for a living," I heard Tom Hanks sneer  on a talk show just recently.  It's finally sunk in on us that a lot of lawyers never did make that much money and on the high end, it seems the bankers make infinitely more money and apparently work a lot less.  

Why didn't someone tell us it would end that wa--oh wait, looks like someone did.  That would be the old scoundrel himself, Vautrin, in Balzac's Le Père Goriot, where he tries to school the young Rastignac in the perils of his chosen career.

By the age of thirty, you will be a judge making 1,200 francs a year, if you haven’t yet tossed away your robes. When you reach forty, you will marry a miller’s daughter with an income of around 6,000 livres.  Thank you very much. If you’re lucky enough to find a patron, you will become a royal prosecutor at thirty, with compensation of a thousand écus [5,000 francs], and you will marry the mayor’s daughter. If you’re willing to do a little political dirty work, you will be a prosecutor-general by the time you’re forty.… It is my privilege to point out to you, however, that there are only twenty prosecutors-general in France, while 20,000 of you aspire to the position, and among them are a few clowns who would sell their families to move up a rung. If this profession disgusts you, consider another. Would Baron de Rastignac like to be a lawyer? Very well then! You will need to suffer ten years of misery, spend a thousand francs a month, acquire a library and an office, frequent society, kiss the hem of a clerk to get cases, and lick the courthouse floor with your tongue . If the profession led anywhere, I wouldn’t advise you against it. But can you name five lawyers in Paris who earn more than 50,000 francs a year at the age of fifty?

Quoted in Piketty, Thomas (2014-03-10). Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Kindle Locations 4140-4148). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Vautrin  then counsels our hero on the more promising path: marry rich.  Sounds like a reasonable choice--except for one whose only marketable skill is "doing homework," where can we expect him to find a rich bride to begin with?  Or is this why they call it "fiction"

No Need for Retirement Planning

In Balzac’s Wrong Side of Paris, Népomucène the firewood-boy doesn’t worry about retirement planning:

“You hear that?” said Népomucène to Godefroid. “The old codger’s batty for sure … “

“And do you know how you will be at his age?...”

“Oh! Indeed I do,” answered Népomucène. “I’ll be in a sugar bowl.”

“In a sugar bowl? …”

“Yes, they’ll have used my bones to make bone black. I’ve seen the refiner’s carts often enough at the Catacombs, coming to fetch bone black for their factories. I hear they make it to use sugar.”

And with this philosophical response he went off for another load of wood.

—Honoré de Balzac, The Wrong Side of Paris 247
(Jordan Stump trans., Modern Library 2005)

Shock of Recognition: Auerbach on the Politics of Boredom

One measure of the power of an artist is the response he induces in others--the "shock of recognition," as Thoreau Melville (and Edmund Wilson) said. Stendhal--vain, chubby, self-absorbed, probably a stalker, who said he wouldn't be appreciated for 100 years--has an almost unmatched knack for provoking this kind of response, beginning with his peer Balzac, who saluted him Balzac was already famous and Stendhal was still an unkown: "never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this," said Balzac, of Charterhouse of Parma.

In Mimesis, on of the monuments of 20th Century literary criticism, Eric Auerbach offers an appreciation of Stendhal's other great novel, Le Rouge et le Noir. In particular, Auerbach shows how precisely Stendhal captures a specific moment in time--Paris, on the eve of the 1830 Revolution:

Even the boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of [the Hôtel de la Mole] is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates, among its adherents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere off pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom, against which the intelligence and good will of the persons involved are powerless. In these salons the things which interest everyone--the political and religious problems of the present, and consequently most of the subjects of its literature or that of the very recent past--could not be discussed, or at best could be discussed only in official phrases s mendacious that a man of taste and tact would rather avoid them. ... [L]ife is governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated. As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in any public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip. In addition, they are obliged to accept as allies snobbish and corrupt people from among the newly-rich bourgeoisie, who, with the unashamed baseness of their ambition and with their fear for their ill-gotten wealth, completely vitiate the atmosphere of society.

So much for the prevailing boredom.

--Eric Auerbach, Mimesis 455-6 (Princeton Paperback 1968)

Bankruptcy's Balzac

Cross-posted from CreditSlips, where I will be guest-blogging for the next few days:

I’ve always argued that bankruptcy law needs its Balzac, except that it has its Balzac, and his name is Balzac. In a broad sense, you could say that everything he wrote is about bankruptcy—or at least about commerce, and usury, and rapacity, and greed, and wild speculation, and all the things that made him Marx’s favorite novelist. He had first-hand experience—it is said that he equipped his house with a special back door, for the escape from creditors (he also took a mistress more than 20 years his senior who was the mother of nine children, go figure). He did write one explicit “bankruptcy” novel, Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau, about a guileless parfumiere, undone by an unworthy servant, but particular references are scattered through any number of other novels. One of the best bits may be the passage in Eugénie Grandet, where the Old Grandet, the miserly cooper, undertakes to de-besmirch the name of his late brother, the speculator and suicide:

Presently des Grasssins called a meeting of creditors, who unanimously appointerd the Saumur banker and François Keller, the head of a large business firm and one of the principal creditors, as joint trustees; and empowered them to do anything they thought necessary to prevent any doubt being cast on the good name of the family, or the bills. The credit Grandet of Saumur enjoyed, the hopes des Grassins roused in the hearts of the creditors as his agent, made this go smoothly. There was not a single dissident voice among the creditors. Nobody dreamed of passing his bills to his profit and loss account, and each man said to himself, ‘Grandet of Saumur will pay!’

Six months went by. The Parisians had withdrawn the bills from circulation, and had put them away underneath all their other business papers. This was the first result the cooper was looking for. Nine months after the first meeting the two trustees distributed forty-seven per cent of the amount owing to each creditor. This sum had been raised by the sale of valuables, property, goods and chattels belonging to the late Guillaume Grandet, a sale made with most scrupulous honesty. The delighted creditors acknowledged the undeniable and admirable integrity of the Grandet brothers. Having praised them and circulated their praises for a suitably decorous length of time, the creditors began to ask when the remainder of their money would be forthcoming. It became necessary to write a collective letter to Grandet.

‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said the old cooper, throwing the letter into the fire. ‘Have patience, my little friends.’

In reply to the propositions put forward in the letter, Grandet of Saumur asked that all the documents involving claims against his late brother’s estate should be deposited with a notary, together with receipts for payments already made, in order, so he said, that the accounts might be audited and to establish correctly just how much money was owed by the estate.

This all goes on for another page or so. Then:

Twenty-three months after Guillaume Grandet’s death, many of the merchants, in the rush of business life in Paris, had forgotten their claims against his estate, or thought of them only to say,

‘I’m beginning to think that the forty-seven percent is all I’ll see of that debt.’

And so it goes. Earlier, young Eugénie had asked the old cooper: ‘What is a bankrupt, father?’
‘A bankrupt,’ answered her father, ‘has committed the most dishonorable deed that a man can dishonour his name by being guilty of. … A bankrupt,’ he went on, ‘is a thief that the law unfortunately takes under its protection.’

--Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (Marion Ayton Crawford trans. 1955)