of, to use his own coinage, the new science of “elegantology.” Even more surprising may be the fact that Balzac considered himself something of a practitioner of the science. He was an odd manifestation of early French dandyism: taking his cues in dress from friends such as Eugène Sue and Lautour-Mézeray (both of whom make appearances in this treatise), Balzac proved to be more of a part-time dandy. The dandy memorialist Captain Gronow provided a particularly amusing assessment of the man’s elegance in practice: “The great enchanter was one of the oiliest and commonest looking mortals I ever beheld; being short and corpulent, with a broad florid face, a cascade of double chins, and straight greasy hair … [he] dressed in the worst possible taste, wore sparkling jewels on a dirty shirt front, and diamond rings on unwashed fingers….”7
Balzac did not, obviously, quite match up to the exacting standards he established in his treatise, and in the end, he himself probably did not see himself in the category. But he introduced a new category into the system, one placed squarely between the busy life and the elegant life: the thinking life of the artist. In Balzac’s words: “The artist is an exception: his idleness is work, and his work, repose; he is elegant and slovenly in turn; he dons, as he pleases, the plowman’s overalls, and determines the tails worn by the man in fashion; he is not subject to laws: he imposes them.”
This introduction of the category of artist would have lasting repercussions on dandyism, particularly the later dandyism of Baudelaire, who had no interest whatsoever in aristocracy, and who essentially presented himself to, and performed for (and ultimately rejected), the artist community. The category of artist is also what shapes Balzac’s portrayal of Brummell. Like most of his contemporaries, and despite Brummell’s presence in France (where he spent his last years in exile to escape his creditors), Balzac’s actual knowledge and understanding of the real Beau Brummell was superficial at best. The abstract nature of the figure of Brummell in France is illustrated by the fact that his very name was consistently misspelled (Balzac employed the spelling of “Brummel” that was standard in France at the time, but this has been adjusted for this translation). Barbey d’Aurevilly would later undertake his biographical portrait of Brummell without even knowing whether or not his subject had ever married; his portrait of the dandy was composed of carefully selected biographical facts which he assembled to create the personalized dandy he envisioned, rather than the dandy that had lived. It must be noted, then, that even though it had been written when Brummell was still alive, the Brummell who appears in Balzac’s treatise is pure fiction and inaccurate in a number of details (a few of which have been pointed out in the notes). What Balzac has him say, however, does the dandy justice. After poking some fun at the inevitable ravages of time upon the dandy (imagining a certain degree of portliness and a wig, details that fall short of the very depressing poverty and madness that in fact awaited Brummell in his final years), Balzac proceeds to envision him as the theorist, aphorist, and author that he never was in life. It is this effort that distinguishes Balzac’s approach to his subject, and it is a difference in evidence from his opening epigraph by Virgil: Mens agitat molem (Mind moves matter). If the effective and often accurate metaphor employed by the English anti-dandiacals described the dandy as an empty suit of clothes, Balzac here pointedly puts the man back into the suit. It is this shift that leads him to make what may at first be a surprising assertion midway through his treatise that the dandy is a “heresy of elegant living.” This dandy he refutes, though, is the dandy of the Regency, the dandy that is to be supplanted by the dandy he is heralding. The snobbery of two-dimensional dandyism was past, the dandy of gender and sexual politics was yet to come; this redefined dandyism, rooted in a redefined Brummell, was the dandyism of ambiguous tyranny, cynical defiance, reactionary rebellion, and budding modernism.
This new dandy also tempers Balzac’s essay, which can at times read fairly conservatively considering the July Revolution that had taken place in France just a few months earlier. Throughout all of his stages, the dandy was very much a product of his times, and if the Regency gave rise to his first incarnation, the political backdrop in France set the tone for a more overt democratization of dandyism, and opened the discourse to the broader political and sociological question of leisure time that would become an increasingly prominent topic over the coming decades.8 For Balzac’s conflation of dandy and artist echoes the one then taking place between the aristocracy and the middle class, the two of which, he here declares, shall “lead the people onto the path of civilization and light.”
July Revolution or not, this alignment was obviously not going to change much for “the people,” and Balzac’s obvious cynicism in this treatise leaves Carlyle’s Drudges little else to do but continue drudging along. But the “enlargened caste” ruling over them, Balzac’s conjoining of “natural-born” aristocratic elegance with the educated middle-class arts and sciences, echoes the paradoxical foundation to this treatise; for if, as Balzac declares, “elegance is less an art than a feeling,” if any man can get rich but must be “born elegant” to be elegant, then of what use is a handbook on the subject? The contradiction in the attempt to democratize a way of living that cannot be taught or studied is one that inevitably arises throughout much of the literature on dandyism.9 It is also what makes the French dandy such a complicated figure, a seamless mixture of reactionary conservatism and avant-garde revolution masked by an unnervingly calm exterior. This contradiction would find itself resolved only in practice: Barbey d’Aurevilly would embrace right-wing conservatism, whereas Baudelaire played a minor role in the 1848 Revolution. By the end of the century, a good portion of the Bohemian Parisian avant-garde would emerge from the shadows of dandyism and decadence to choose between the extremist paths of conservative proto-fascism and bomb-throwing anarchism.
Balzac maintains (perhaps masks) the paradox at the root of his subject with the folksy-scientific style of the physiology that was popular in his day, and one that he repeatedly employed—most fully in his Physiology of Marriage, but less blatantly throughout all of his novels. All physiologies of that time stemmed from the work of Johann Caspar Lavater, which in its broad strokes offered the sometimes troubling, and decidedly flawed, lesson that appearances were, in fact, everything.10 But Balzac’s more immediate mentor in the format was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose 1825 Physiology of Taste injected a range of humor, anecdotes, and axioms into an extremely personalized and popularized version of the scientific framework. What Brillat-Savarin had done for gourmandism and gastronomy, Balzac had intended to do for nineteenth-century French society. His Human Comedy would go a long way in carrying out this project, although its 91 novels and short stories fell short of the 137 he had originally planned. An essential component to his project, however, was to be a series of analytical studies to be entitled Pathology of Social Life. Only the first part, The physiology of Marriage, was ever written, though, and it has long been available in English translation. Two of the others, the Anatomy of Educational Bodies and the Monograph on Virtue, were never written. The fourth, which he referred to variously as Complete Treatise on Exterior Life, On Elegant Living, or the Pathology of Social Life itself, was at least started. Though it had originally been written for the journal La Mode, it was his intention to incorporate the Treatise on Elegant Living into it, along with two other completed components, his Theory of Walking and Treatise on Modern Stimulants. A number of other short essays and sketches exist that may well have been intended for eventual inclusion in this project (titles include “Physiology of the Cigar,” “Gastronomic Physiology,” “Physiology of Clothing,” and “Study of Manners through Gloves”), but given Balzac’s voluminous output and lack of specific indications, only guesses can be made as to what would or would not have been incorporated.
It is obvious, given the outline Balzac sketched out at the end of chapter III, that the Treatise on Elegant Living was never finished. It is also likely that the later Theory of Walking grew out of the projected chapter on gait and deportment, but nothing exists of those chapters he announces on manners and conversation, nor of what was to be the intriguing contribution by Eugène Sue on impertinence. Be that as it may, Balzac did set enough down to allow us a clear understanding of the unified triad essential to any understanding and practice of elegant living: simplicity, cleanliness, and harmony.
