Petty troubles of married life (collection). Minor Troubles of Married Life (compilation) download fb2 Reflection I Theme

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote about marriage throughout his life, but two of his writings deal specifically with this topic. The Physiology of Marriage (1829) is a witty treatise on the war of the sexes. Here are listed all the means that a husband can resort to in order not to become a cuckold. However, Balzac looks gloomily on the prospects for marriage: sooner or later, the wife will cheat on her husband anyway, and he will get, at best, "rewards" in the form of delicious food or a high position. "Small Troubles of Married Life" (1846) depicts marriage from a different perspective. Here Balzac talks about family everyday life: from tender feelings, the spouses turn to cooling, and only those couples who have arranged a marriage of four are happy. The author himself called this book "hermaphrodite", since the story is told first from a male and then from a female point of view. In addition, this book is experimental: Balzac invites the reader to choose the characteristics of the characters himself and mentally fill in the gaps in the text. Both works...

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Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote about marriage throughout his life, but two of his writings deal specifically with this topic. The Physiology of Marriage (1829) is a witty treatise on the war of the sexes. Here are listed all the means that a husband can resort to in order not to become a cuckold. However, Balzac looks gloomily on the prospects for marriage: sooner or later, the wife will cheat on her husband anyway, and he will get, at best, “rewards” in the form of delicious food or a high position. "Small Troubles of Married Life" (1846) depicts marriage from a different angle. Here Balzac talks about family everyday life: from tender feelings, the spouses turn to cooling, and only those couples who have arranged a marriage of four are happy. The author himself called this book "hermaphrodite", since the story is told first from a male and then from a female point of view. In addition, this book is experimental: Balzac invites the reader to choose the characteristics of the characters himself and mentally fill in the gaps in the text. Both works are published in translation and with notes by Vera Milchina, a leading researcher at STEPS RANEPA and IVGI RGGU. The translation of The Physiology of Marriage, first published in 1995, has been significantly revised for this edition; translation of "Petty Troubles" is published for the first time.

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Minor Troubles of Married Life (collection) - description and summary, author de Balzac Honore, read for free online on the website of the electronic library website

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) wrote about marriage throughout his life, but two of his writings specifically deal with this topic. The Physiology of Marriage (1829) is a witty treatise on the war of the sexes. Here are listed all the means that a husband can resort to in order not to become a cuckold. However, Balzac looks gloomily on the prospects for marriage: sooner or later, the wife will cheat on her husband anyway, and he will get, at best, “rewards” in the form of delicious food or a high position. The Petty Troubles of Married Life (1846) depict marriage from a different angle. Here Balzac talks about family everyday life: from tender feelings, the spouses turn to cooling, and only those couples who have arranged a marriage of four are happy. The author himself called this book "hermaphrodite", since the story is told first from a male and then from a female point of view. In addition, this book is experimental: Balzac invites the reader to choose the characteristics of the characters himself and mentally fill in the gaps in the text. Both works are published in translation and with notes by Vera Milchina, a leading researcher at STEPS RANEPA and IVGI RGGU. The translation of The Physiology of Marriage, first published in 1995, has been significantly revised for this edition; translation of "Petty Troubles" is published for the first time.

A series: Culture of everyday life

* * *

by the LitRes company.

The Physiology of Marriage, or Eclectic Reflections on the Joys and Sorrows of Marriage

dedication

Note the words about "the man of distinction for whom this book was written" (p. 101). Doesn't that mean "For you"?

Author

A woman who, seduced by the title of this book, wishes to open it, may not work: and without reading, she knows in advance everything that is said here. The most cunning of men will never be able to say either so much good or so much bad about women as they think about themselves. If, in spite of my warning, some lady nevertheless begins to read this work, she should, out of delicacy, refrain from mocking the author, who, voluntarily depriving himself of the right to the most flattering approval for the artist, placed on the title page of his work that something like that pre-emptive inscription, which can be seen on the doors of other establishments: "Not for ladies."

Introduction

“Nature does not provide for marriage. The Eastern family has nothing to do with the Western family. Man is the servant of nature, and society is its latest fruit. “Laws are written according to mores, but mores change.”

Therefore, marriage, like all earthly things, is subject to gradual improvement.

These words, uttered by Napoleon in front of the Council of State during the discussion of the Civil Code, deeply struck the author of this book and, perhaps by chance, suggested to him the idea of \u200b\u200bthe work that he is today submitting to the public. The fact is that in his youth he happened to study French law, and the word "adultery" had a striking effect on him. So often found in the codex, this word appeared to the author's imagination in the most gloomy surroundings. Tears, Shame, Enmity, Horror, Secret Crimes, Bloody Wars, Orphaned Families, Grief - this is the retinue that stood before the author's inner gaze, as soon as he read the sacramental word ADULTER! Later, having gained access to the most exquisite secular drawing rooms, the author noticed that the severity of the marriage laws was very often softened there by Adultery. He found that the number of unhappy families greatly outnumbered the happy ones. Finally, he seems to have been the first to point out that of all the sciences, the science of marriage is the least developed. However, that was the observation of the young man, which, as often happens, was lost in the series of his chaotic thoughts: like a stone thrown into the water sinks. However, the author involuntarily continued to observe the world, and gradually a whole swarm of more or less correct ideas about the nature of marriage customs took shape in his imagination. The laws of the ripening of books in the souls of their authors are perhaps no less mysterious than the laws of the growth of truffles on the fragrant Perigord plains. From the initial sacred horror caused in the heart of the author by adultery, from the observations made by him out of frivolity, one fine morning, an idea was born - a very insignificant one, but absorbing some of the author's ideas. It was a mockery of marriage: two spouses fell in love with each other twenty-seven years after the wedding.

The author derived considerable pleasure from composing a little marriage pamphlet, and for a whole week with pleasure put down on paper innumerable thoughts connected with this innocent epigram - thoughts involuntary and unexpected. A remark to which it was impossible not to heed put an end to this weaving of words. Heeding the advice, the author returned to his usual carefree and idle existence. However, the first experience of amusing research was not in vain, and the seed sown in the cornfield of the author's mind sprouted: each phrase of the condemned composition took root and became like a tree branch, which, if left on a winter evening on the sand, is covered in the morning with intricate white patterns, which draw freaky frost. Thus, the sketch continued its existence and gave life to many moral offshoots. Like a polyp, he multiplied without outside help. Impressions of youth, annoying thoughts were confirmed by the smallest events of subsequent years. Moreover, all this multitude of ideas was ordered, came to life, almost took on a human form and set off to wander around those fantastic lands where the soul likes to release its reckless offspring. Whatever the author did, there was always a certain voice in his soul, throwing the most caustic remarks at the most charming society ladies who danced, chatted or laughed before his eyes. Just as Mephistopheles imagined the eerie figures gathered on the Brocken to Faust, so a certain demon seemed to unceremoniously grab the author by the shoulder in the midst of the ball and whisper: “Do you see this seductive smile? It's a smile of hate." Sometimes the demon flaunted like a captain from the old Ardi comedies. He wrapped himself in an embroidered purple cloak and boasted of dilapidated tinsel and rags of former glory, trying to convince the author that they sparkled like new ones. At times he burst into loud and infectious Rabelaisian laughter and wrote on the walls of the houses a word that was a worthy pair to the famous "Trink!" - the only divination that could be obtained from the Divine bottle. Sometimes this literary Trilby sat down on a pile of books and slyly pointed with his hooked fingers at two yellow volumes, the title of which dazzled the eyes; when the demon finally managed to attract the attention of the author, he began to repeat clearly and piercingly, as if plucking the harmonica: “PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE!” But most often he appeared to the author in the evening, before going to bed. Gentle as a fairy, he tried to lull the soul of the mortal he had enslaved with gentle speeches. As mocking as it is captivating, flexible as a woman, and bloodthirsty as a tiger, he could not caress without scratching; his friendship was more dangerous than his hatred. One night he put all his charms into play, and at the end resorted to the last proof. He appeared and sat on the edge of the bed, like a maiden in love, who at first remains silent and only looks at the adored young man with burning eyes, but in the end she can’t stand it and pours out her feelings to him. “Here,” he said, “is a description of a suit that allows you to walk on the surface of the Seine without getting your feet wet. And here is the Institute's report on clothing that allows one to walk through flames without getting burned. Will you not be able to invent a remedy that protects marriage from cold and heat? Listen! I know such works as “On the Ways of Preserving Food,” “On the Ways of Building Fireplaces That Don’t Smoke,” “On the Ways of Casting Excellent Mortars,” “On the Ways of Tying a Tie,” “On the Ways of Cutting Meat.”

“These myriads of books have found their readers,” the demon continued, “although far from everyone builds houses and sees the purpose of life in food, far from everyone has a tie and a fireplace, meanwhile, very many marry! .. But what can I say, look !..

He pointed with his hand into the distance, and the author's eyes appeared to the ocean, where all the books published recently were swaying on the waves. The eighteenth-leaf volumes bounced, gurgling, sinking to the bottom of the volume in-octavo, floating up with great difficulty, for the twelfth and thirty-second half-leaf little books swarmed all around, forming airy foam. Fierce waves tormented journalists, compositors, apprentices, messengers from printing houses, whose heads stuck out of the water mixed with books. Here and there boatmen scurried about, fishing books out of the water and carrying them ashore to a tall, arrogant man in a black dress, lean and impregnable: he embodied the booksellers and the public. The demon pointed with his finger at the boat, adorned with brand new flags, rushing forward at full sail and adorned with a poster instead of a flag; laughing sardonically, he read in a piercing voice: "PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE."

Then the author fell in love, and the devil left him alone, for if he penetrated where the woman settled, he would have to deal with too strong an adversary. Several years passed in torment caused by love alone, and the author considered that he had knocked out a wedge with a wedge. But one evening in one of the Parisian drawing rooms, going up to a handful of people gathered in a circle near the fireplace, he heard an anecdote told in a grave voice as follows:

“During my stay in Ghent, the following incident occurred there. A certain lady, who had been a widow for ten years, lay on her deathbed. Three relatives who claimed her inheritance were waiting for the last breath of the sick woman and did not leave her bed a single step, fearing that she would not write off her entire fortune to the Begin monastery there. The patient kept silent; she seemed to be asleep, and death slowly took possession of her pale, numb face. Can you imagine this picture: three relatives are awake in silence on a winter night near the bedside of a sick person? The nurse shakes her head, and the doctor, anxiously realizing that there is no salvation, takes his hat with one hand, and with the other makes a sign to the relatives, as if saying: “You will no longer need my services.” In solemn silence, you can hear how a blizzard howls muffledly outside the window and the shutters slam in the wind. The youngest of the heirs covered the candle standing by the bed, so that the light would not hurt the eyes of the dying woman, so that her bed would sink into semi-darkness, and her face would turn yellow on the pillow, like a badly gilded figure of Christ on a tarnished silver crucifix. And so, the dark room, where the drama was to take place, was lit only by the unsteady bluish flame of the sparkling hearth. The denouement was accelerated by a firebrand that suddenly rolled to the floor. Hearing her knock, the patient suddenly sits up in bed and opens her eyes, burning like those of a cat; everyone in the room looks at her in amazement. She stares intently at the rolling firebrand, and then, before her family can recover, she jumps out of bed in some kind of nervous fit, grabs the tongs, and tosses the firebrand back into the fireplace. Then the nurse, the doctor, the heirs rush to the patient, pick her up by the arms, lower her onto the bed, put a pillow under her head; not even ten minutes pass before she dies, never taking her eyes off that piece of parquet where the firebrand fell. Before Countess Van Ostrum had breathed her last, the three heirs looked at each other in disbelief and, completely forgetting about their aunt, fixed their eyes on the mysterious floorboard. The heirs were Belgians, which means they knew how to instantly calculate their benefits. After exchanging a few whispers, they agreed that neither of them would leave the aunt's bedroom. The footman was sent for the carpenter. How three kindred spirits trembled when their owners, bending over the luxurious parquet, followed the actions of the apprentice boy, who had stuck his chisel into the tree. The floorboard cracked. “Auntie has moved!” cried the youngest of the heirs. “No, it’s just a play of light,” answered the eldest, who looked after both the treasure and the deceased at the same time. Inconsolable relatives found under the parquet, exactly in the place where the firebrand fell, a certain object, carefully hidden by a layer of plaster. “Act!..” – said the eldest heir. The apprentice's chisel forged the plaster, and a human skull appeared in the light of day, in which - I don’t remember by what signs - the heirs recognized the count, who, as it was known to the whole city, died on the island of Java and was deeply mourned by a mournful widow.

The narrator who told us this old story was a tall, lean, dark-haired man with reddish eyes, in whom the author felt a distant resemblance to the demon that once tormented him so much, but the stranger did not have cloven hooves. Suddenly, the author's ear was struck by the word Adultery, and before his inner gaze appeared the entire sinister cortege that accompanied these significant syllables in former times.

Since then, the specter of the unwritten work again began to relentlessly pursue the author; there was never a time in his life when he was so much annoyed by absurd thoughts about the fatal subject of this book. However, he courageously resisted the demon, although he linked the most insignificant events of the author's life with this unknown creation and, as if in mockery, likened to a customs official and applied his seal everywhere.

A few days later, the author happened to be talking to two charming females. The first was once one of the most kind-hearted and witty ladies at the court of Napoleon. Having reached a very high position under the Empire, with the onset of the Restoration, she lost everything she had and began to live as a hermit. The second, young and beautiful, enjoyed great success in Parisian society at the time of our conversation. The ladies were friends, for the first was forty, the second - twenty-two, and they rarely turned out to be rivals. One of them was not at all embarrassed by the presence of the author, the other guessed his intentions, so they continued to discuss their women's affairs with complete frankness in his presence.

“Have you noticed, my dear, that women, as a rule, love only fools?

“What are you talking about, Duchess! Why, then, do they always abhor their husbands?

(“Why, this is sheer tyranny!” thought the author. “Now, then, the devil has put on a cap?”)

“No, my dear, I am not kidding,” continued the duchess, “more than that, peering coolly at those men whom I myself once knew, I shudder. The mind always hurts us with its brilliance, a man of sharp mind frightens us; if this person is proud, he will not become jealous of us, which means that he will not be able to please us. Finally, it is perhaps more pleasant for us to elevate a man to ourselves than to rise to him ourselves ... A talented person will share his victories with us, but a fool will give us pleasure, therefore it is more pleasant for us to hear how they say about our chosen one: “How handsome!” – than to know that he was elected to the Academy.

“Enough, duchess! You are scaring me.

After going through all the lovers who drove her familiar ladies crazy, the young coquette did not find a single intelligent person among them.

“However, I swear by virtue,” she said, “their husbands are much more worthy people ...

But they are husbands! the Duchess answered importantly.

“Of course,” the duchess laughed. “And the fury that some ladies feel against their comrades, who had the misfortune to bring happiness to themselves and take a lover, proves how their chastity burdens the poor things. One would have become Laisa a long time ago if her fear of the devil had not stopped her, the other is virtuous solely due to her insensitivity, the third - because of the stupidity of her first lover, the fourth ...

The author stopped this stream of revelations by telling the ladies about his persistent desire to write a book about marriage; the ladies smiled and promised him not to skimp on advice. The younger one cheerfully paid her first share, promising to prove mathematically that women of impeccable virtue exist only in the imagination.

In introducing you to a biography of his own composition, the author is guided by no means petty vanity. He sets forth facts worthy of a contribution to the history of human thought and capable, no doubt, of clarifying the essence of the book itself. For some anatomists of thought, it may be useful to know that the soul is a woman. Therefore, while the author forbade himself to think about the book he was to write, fragments of it appeared to him everywhere. He found one page at the bedside of the patient, the other - on a canapé in the boudoir. The glances of the women drifting away in the whirlwind of the waltz gave him new ideas; a gesture or a word fed his arrogant mind. But the day he said to himself, “Well! I will write this essay that haunts me! .. ”- everything disappeared; like the three Belgians, the author discovered a skeleton at the site of the treasure.

The demon-tempter was replaced by a person meek and pale, good-natured and courteous, wary of resorting to painful injections of criticism. She was more generous with words than with thoughts, and seemed to be afraid of noise. Perhaps it was a genius who inspired the honorable deputies of the center.

"Isn't it better," she said, "to leave things as they are?" Is everything really that bad? One should believe in marriage as sacredly as in the immortality of the soul, and your book will certainly not serve to glorify family happiness. In addition, you are about to begin to judge family life by the example of a thousand Parisian married couples, and they are nothing but exceptions. Perhaps you will meet husbands who agree to betray their wives into your power, but not a single son will agree to betray his mother to you ... There will be people who, offended by your views, will suspect you of immorality and malice. In a word, only kings, or at least first consuls, are allowed to touch public ulcers.

Although Reason appeared to the author in the most pleasant of guises, the author did not heed his advice; for in the distance folly was waving Panurge's rattle, and the author longed to take possession of it; however, when he took it, it turned out that it was heavier than the club of Hercules; besides, by the will of the curate of Meudon, a young man who appreciates good gloves much more than a good book, access to this rattle is ordered.

“Alas, madame, will you recompense me for all the curses he will bring upon my head?”

She gestured at the doubt, which the author treated very nonchalantly.

- Do you hesitate? she continued. - Publish what you wrote, do not be afraid. Today, in books, cut is valued much more than matter.

Although the author was no more than the secretary of the two ladies, yet, putting their observations in order, he spent a lot of effort. To create a book on marriage, there was perhaps only one thing left to do - to put together what everyone thinks about, but no one talks about; however, having completed such work, a person who thinks like everyone else runs the risk of not being liked by anyone! However, the eclecticism of this work may save him. While mocking, the author tried to give readers a few comforting ideas. He tirelessly strove to find unknown strings in the human soul. Defending the most material interests, evaluating or condemning them, he, perhaps, pointed out to people more than one source of mental pleasures. However, the author is not so stupid and arrogant as to claim that all his jokes are equally exquisite; simply, relying on the diversity of minds, he expects to win as much censure as praise. The subject of his reasoning is so serious that he constantly tried to joke narration, for today anecdotes are the credentials of any morality and the anti-sleeping component of any book. As for the "Physiology of Marriage", the essence of which is observation and analysis, it was impossible for its author not to tire the reader with the writer's teachings. But this, as the author knows very well, is the most terrible of all the troubles that threaten the writer. That is why, while working on his lengthy study, the author took care to give the reader a break from time to time. This mode of narration was consecrated by a writer who produced a work on taste similar to that which the author wrote on marriage, a work from which the author took the liberty of borrowing a few lines containing a thought common to both books. He wished in this way to pay tribute to his predecessor, who died barely having time to enjoy the success that fell to his lot.

“When I write and speak about myself in the singular, I seem to strike up a conversation with the reader, I give him the opportunity to explore, argue, doubt and even laugh, but as soon as I arm myself with the formidable WE, I begin to preach, and the reader can only obey "(Brillat-Savarin. Preface to the "Physiology of Taste").

December 5, 1829

Part one

General provisions

Diderot. Addendum to the Bougainville Journey

Meditation I

Subject

Physiology, what do you want from me?

Do you want to prove that marital bonds unite for life a man and a woman who do not know each other?

That the purpose of life is passion, and that no passion can resist marriage?

That marriage is an institution necessary to maintain order in society, but contrary to the laws of nature?

That, despite all its flaws, marriage is the first source of property?

That it provides governments with countless guarantees of their strength?

That there is something touching in the union of two beings who have decided to endure the hardships of life together?

That there is something funny in the spectacle of two wills driven by one thought?

That a married woman is treated like a slave?

That there are no perfectly happy marriages in the world?

That marriage is fraught with terrible crimes, many of which we cannot even imagine?

That fidelity does not exist; in any case, men are not capable of it?

That, by investigating, it would be possible to find out how much more the transfer of property by inheritance promises troubles than benefits?

That adultery brings more evil than marriage brings good?

That women have been cheating on men since the beginning of human history, but this chain of deceit could not destroy the institution of marriage?

That the laws of love bind two so tightly that no human law can separate them?

That, besides the marriages made in the city hall, there are marriages based on the call of nature, on the captivating similarity or decisive dissimilarity of thoughts, as well as on bodily attraction, and that, therefore, heaven and earth constantly contradict one another?

That there are husbands of high stature and great intelligence, whose wives cheat on them with lovers short, ugly and brainless?

The answer to each of these questions could make up a separate book, but books have already been written, and people are faced with questions again and again.

Will you reveal new principles to me? Will you praise the community of wives? Lycurgus and other Greek tribes, Tatars and savages tried this method.

Or do you think women should be locked up? The Turks used to do just that, and now they are beginning to give their girlfriends freedom.

Perhaps you will say that daughters should be given in marriage without a dowry and without the right to inherit the wealth of their parents? .. English writers and moralists proved that this, along with divorce, is the surest reason happy marriages.

Or maybe you are convinced that every family needs its own Hagar? But for this there is no need to change the laws. The article of the Code, which threatens the wife with punishment for cheating on her husband anywhere in the world and condemns the husband only if the concubine lives with him under the same roof, secretly encourages men to take lovers outside the home.

Sanchez considered all possible violations of marital customs; moreover, he discussed the legitimacy and appropriateness of every pleasure, calculated all the moral, religious, carnal duties of spouses; in a word, if you publish his tome, entitled "De Matrimonio", in-octavo format, you get a good dozen volumes.

A bunch of jurists in a bunch of treatises have considered all sorts of legal subtleties associated with the institution of marriage. There are even works devoted to the examination of the suitability of spouses for the performance of marital duties.

Legions of physicians have produced legions of books on marriage in relation to surgery and medicine.

Consequently, in the nineteenth century, the Physiology of Marriage is destined to be either a mediocre compilation or a fool's work written for other fools: decrepit priests, armed with gilded scales, weighed on them the slightest transgressions; decrepit jurists, putting on glasses, divided these sins into types and subtypes; decrepit doctors, holding a scalpel, opened with it every conceivable wound; decrepit judges, perched on their seats, examined all irreparable vices; whole generations let out a cry of joy or grief; each age has given its voice; The Holy Spirit, poets and prose writers have taken note of everything from Eve to the Trojan War, from Helena to Madame de Maintenon, from the wife of Louis XIV to Contemporary.

What do you want from me, Physiology?

Do you want, for an hour, to please me with more or less masterful paintings, designed to prove that a man is getting married:

out of Ambition… well, everybody knows that;

from Thrift, desiring to put an end to litigation;

from the Faith that life has passed and it is time to put an end to it;

out of Stupidity, like a youngster who has finally escaped from college;

from the Spirit of Contradiction, like Lord Byron;

from the Natural desire to fulfill the will of the late uncle, who bequeathed to his nephew, in addition to his fortune, also a bride;

from the Wisdom of Life, which still happens to doctrinaires;

out of Anger at an unfaithful mistress;

from devout devotion, like the Duke de Saint-Aignan, who did not want to wallow in sin;

from Selfishness - perhaps not a single marriage is free from it;

from Love - in order to be cured of it forever;

from Machiavellianism - in order to immediately take possession of the property of the old woman;

from the need to give a name our son;

from the Fear of being left alone because of his ugliness;

out of Gratitude - while giving much more than received;

from Disappointment in the charms of a bachelor's life;

from Ignorance - you can’t do without it;

from Turkish circumstantiality;

out of Respect for the customs of the ancestors;

for philanthropic motives, in order to wrest the girl from the hands of a tyrannical mother;

from Cunning, so that your fortune does not go to greedy relatives;

from Ambition, as Georges Danden;

from Scrupulousness, for the young lady could not resist.

(Those who wish can easily find the use of the remaining letters of the alphabet.)

By the way, all the cases listed have already been described in thirty thousand comedies and in a hundred thousand novels.

Physiology, I ask you for the third and last time, what do you want from me?

The matter is, after all, hackneyed, like a street pavement, familiar, like a crossing of roads. We know much more about marriage than about the gospel Barabbas; all the ancient ideas associated with it have been discussed in literature since time immemorial, and there is no such useful advice and such a absurd project that would not have found its author, printer, bookseller and reader.

Let me tell you, following the example of our common teacher Rabelais: “God save you and have mercy on you, good people! Where are you? I do not see you. Let me put my glasses on my nose. Ah! Now I see you. Is everyone in good health - yourself, your spouses, your children, your relatives and household members? Okay, great, happy for you."

But I am not writing for you. As soon as you have adult children, everything is clear with you.

“Good people, glorious drunkards, and you, venerable gouts, and you, tireless skimmers, and you, vigorous fellows, who pantagruelize all day long, and keep pretty birds locked up, and do not miss either the third, or the sixth, or the ninth hour, or Vespers , no Compline, and you will not carry anything past your mouth in the future.

Physiology is not addressed to you, you are not married. Amen!

“You damn hoodies, clumsy saints, dissolute hypocrites, air-damaging cats and other persons who put on to deceive good people fancy dress! .. - get out of the way, back down! don't let your spirit be here, you brainless creatures!.. Get the hell out of here! I swear to the devil, are you still here?

Perhaps only good souls who love to laugh will remain with me. Not those crybabies who almost rush to drown themselves in verse and prose, who sing of illnesses in odes, sonnets and reflections, not countless dreamers, idle talkers, but a few ancient pantagruelists who do not hesitate for a long time, if they have the opportunity to drink and laugh, who like Rabelais's discourses about peas in lard, cum commento, and about the virtues of codpieces, people are wise, swift in the race, fearless in their grip and respecting tidbits of books.

Since the government has found a way to collect from us taxes of one and a half hundred millions, there is no more urine to laugh at the government. Popes and bishops, priests and priestesses are not yet rich enough for us to drink from them; one hope that St. Michael, who drove the devil from heaven, will remember us, and then it will look like there will be a holiday on our street! So far, marriage remains the only laughing matter in France. Followers of Panurge, I need no other readers than you. You know how to take up a book in time and discard it in time, you know how to enjoy life, understand everything perfectly and suck a drop of brain out of a bone.

People who look at everything through a microscope, who see no further than their own nose, in a word, censors - have they said everything, have they examined everything? Did they pronounce their judgment on a book about marriage that is as impossible to write as it is impossible to glue a shattered pitcher together?

- Yes, master-madman. Whatever one may say, nothing else will come of marriage but pleasure for bachelors and trouble for husbands. This rule is forever. Write at least a million pages, you can't imagine another.

And yet here is my first statement: marriage is a war not for life, but for death, before the beginning of which the spouses ask for blessings from Heaven, for to love each other forever is the most daring of enterprises; immediately after the prayers, a battle breaks out, and victory, that is, freedom, goes to the one who is more dexterous.

Let's say. But what's new here?

The thing is this: I am speaking to husbands, past and present, to those who, leaving the church or from the town hall, flatter themselves with the hope that their wives will belong to them alone, to those who, obeying an indescribable selfishness or an inexplicable feeling, say at the sight of other people's misfortunes: "This will not happen to me!"

I appeal to sailors who, having witnessed shipwrecks more than once, again and again set sail, to those bachelors who dare to marry, although they have often ruined the virtue of other people's wives. For example, history is eternally new and eternally ancient!

A young man, or maybe an old man, in love, or maybe not, who has just signed a marriage contract and straightened out all the papers in the mayor's office, according to all the laws of earth and heaven, gets a young girl with lush curls, black moist eyes, small legs, lovely thin fingers, scarlet lips and ivory teeth, beautifully built, quivering, appetizing and seductive, snow-white, like a lily, shining with all conceivable beauties: her eyelashes lowered to the floor are like the crown of the Lombard kings, her face is fresh, like a corolla of a white camellia , and ruddy, like red petals; her virginal cheeks are covered with a barely noticeable fluff, like a tender, freshly ripened peach; hot blood runs through blue veins under fair skin; she craves life and bestows life; all of it is joy and love, charm and naivety. She loves her husband, or at least thinks she does...

A husband in love swears in his heart: “These eyes will look at me alone, these timid lips will speak of love to me alone, this gentle hand will bestow treasured treasures of voluptuousness on me alone, this chest will heave only at the sound of my voice, this sleeping the soul wakes up only at my command; only I will be allowed to run my fingers through these silky strands, only I will be able to caress this quivering head in unconsciousness. I will keep Death awake at my bedside, and bar the plundering strangers from my marriage bed; this throne of passion will be drowned in blood - either in the blood of reckless insolents, or in my own. Peace, honor, bliss, paternal affection, the well-being of my children - everything depends on the impregnability of my bedchamber, and I will protect it, as a lioness protects her cubs. Woe to him who invades my lair!”

Well, brave athlete, we applaud your determination. Until now, no geometer has dared to plot longitudes and latitudes on a map of the marital sea. Men of great experience did not dare to mark the shoals, reefs, pitfalls, breezes and monsoons, the coastline and undercurrents that ruined their ships - they were so ashamed of the wreck that befell them. Married wanderers lacked a guidebook, a compass ... this book is intended to replace them.

To say nothing of grocers and clothiers, there are many people who have no time to delve into the hidden impulses that move their wives; to offer them a detailed classification of all the secrets of marriage - the duty of philanthropy; a well-written table of contents will enable them to comprehend the movements of their wives' hearts, just as a logarithm table enables them to multiply numbers.

So what do you say? Can you not admit that to prevent wives from deceiving their husbands is an unheard-of undertaking that no philosopher has yet dared to undertake? Isn't this a comedy for all comedies? Is this not another speculum vitae humanae? Away with the absurd questions to which we have pronounced a just verdict in this Meditation. Today, in morality, as in the exact sciences, facts and observations are needed. We will present them.

To begin with, let's delve into the true state of affairs, weigh the strengths of both sides. Before supplying our imaginary winner with weapons, let's count the number of his enemies, those Cossacks who dream of conquering his native corner.

Swim with us who wants to, laugh who can. Weigh anchor, raise sail! You know the starting point. This is the great advantage of our book over many others.

As for our whim, which makes us laugh while weeping and weep while laughing, just as the divine Rabelais drank when he ate and ate when he drank; what about our mania to combine Heraclitus and Democritus on one page, to write without caring about either the style or the meaning ... if one of the crew members does not like it, down with all this brethren from the ship: old men whose brains are swollen with fat , classics, not out of the veils, romantics, wrapped in a shroud - and full speed ahead!

The expelled may blame us for being like people who joyfully declare: “I will tell you a joke that you will laugh at your heart's content! ..” Nothing like that: marriage is a serious matter! Haven't you guessed that we look at marriage as a slight ailment from which no one is protected, and that our book is a scholarly work on this disease?

“However, you and your ship or your book are like those coachmen who, driving away from the station, slap their whip with might and main just because they are carrying the English. You will not have time to ride at full speed and half a league, when you already stop to tighten the lines or give rest to the horses. Why blow trumpets before you have won a victory?

– Eh, dear pantagruelists, today, in order to succeed, it is enough to claim it; and since perhaps great works are ultimately nothing but insignificant ideas wrapped up in long phrases, I do not understand why I should not acquire laurels, if only to decorate the salted hams, under which it is so nice to skip glass! .. Wait a minute, captain! Before we set sail, let's give one little definition.

Readers, since on the pages of this book, as well as in secular drawing rooms, you will from time to time come across the words "virtue" and "virtuous woman", let's agree on their meaning: we call virtue that complaisance with which a wife reluctantly gives this heart husband exceptions are rare cases when this word is given a common sense; natural quick wits will help readers to distinguish one from the other.

Meditation II

Marriage statistics

For two decades now, the authorities have been trying to determine how many hectares of French land are occupied by forests, how many by meadows and vineyards, how much is left fallow. Pundits went further: they wanted to know the number of animals of a particular breed. Moreover, they counted cubic meters of firewood, kilograms of beef, liters of wine, the number of apples and eggs exterminated by the Parisians. But neither the honor of those men who have already entered into marriage, nor the interests of those who are just preparing to do so, nor morality and the improvement of human institutions, have not yet prompted a single statistician to count the number of decent women living in France. How! The French Ministry will be able, if necessary, to report how many soldiers and spies, officials and schoolchildren it has, but ask it about virtuous women ... and what? If the French king had the crazy idea of looking for his august wife among his subjects, the ministers would not even be able to tell him the total number of white sheep from which he could choose her; some sort of virtue contest would have to be instituted, which is simply ridiculous.

Is it really not only politics, but also morality that we should learn from the ancients? It is known from history that Artaxerxes, wishing to take a wife from among the daughters of Persia, chose Esther, the most virtuous and most beautiful. Consequently, his ministers knew a way to skim the cream off their subjects. Unfortunately, the Bible, which is so clear on all matters of married life, does not give us any guidance regarding the choice of a wife.

Let's try to fill in the gaps left by government officials and make a census of the female population of France. We appeal to all who care about public morality and ask them to be our judges. We will try to show enough generosity in calculations, and enough accuracy in reasoning, so that all readers agree with the results of our research.

France is believed to have approximately thirty million inhabitants.

Other naturalists claim that there are more women than men in the world, however, since many statisticians are of the opposite opinion, let us assume that there are fifteen million women in France.

First of all, let us exclude from the number mentioned about nine million creatures who at first glance are very similar to women, but which, on sound reflection, will have to be discounted.

Let's explain.

Naturalists believe that man is the only species belonging to the family of the Two-armed, as indicated on page 16 of Dumeril's Analytical Zoology; only Bory Saint-Vincent considered it necessary, for the sake of completeness, to add to this species one more - the Orangutan.

If zoologists see us as nothing more than a mammal that has thirty-two vertebrae, a hyoid bone, and more convolutions in the cerebral hemispheres than any other creature; if for them all the differences between people are explained by the influence of climate, which gave rise to fifteen varieties of this individual, the scientific names of which I do not consider it necessary to enumerate, then the creator of Physiology has the right to divide people into types and subspecies in accordance with their mental abilities, moral properties and property status.

So, the nine million creatures that we are talking about, at first glance, are completely similar to humans, as zoologists describe it: they have a hyoid bone, coracoid and humeral processes of the scapula, as well as a zygomatic arch, so gentlemen zoologists have every right to rank them to the category of Two-handed, but to see women in them - the author of our Physiology will not agree to this for anything in the world.

For us and for those to whom this book is intended, a woman is a rare species of the human race, the physiological properties of which we will now name for you.

A woman in our understanding is the fruit of the special efforts of men who have not spared either gold or the moral warmth of civilization for improving her breed. The first distinguishing feature of a woman is the whiteness, tenderness and silkiness of the skin. The woman is extremely clean. Her fingers should touch only soft, fluffy, fragrant objects. Like a stoat, she is capable of dying of grief if someone stains her white clothes. She loves to comb her curls and spray them with perfume, the aroma of which intoxicates and intoxicates, to groom her pink marigolds and give them an almond shape, to perform ablutions as often as possible, immersing her fragile body in water. At night, she can rest only on the softest down jackets, during the day - only on sofas stuffed with hair, and her favorite position is horizontal. Her voice is touching and gentle, her movements are full of grace. She speaks with amazing ease. She does not engage in any hard work, and yet, despite external weakness, she bears other burdens with surprising ease. She is afraid of the sun and protects herself from its rays with the help of the most ingenious devices. Walking is hard work for her; does she eat anything? it's a riddle; does it send any other needs? it's a secret. Infinitely curious, she easily submits to anyone who can hide the smallest trifle from her, because her mind needs to search for the unknown. Her religion is love; she only thinks about how to please her lover. To be loved is the goal of all her actions, to arouse desire is the goal of all her gestures. Therefore, she is always looking for ways to shine; it can exist only in an atmosphere of grace and elegance; for her, a young Indian woman spins the weightless fluff of Tibetan goats, for her, Tarar weaves airy blankets, for her, Brussels craftswomen weave the purest and finest lace, Vizapur treasure seekers steal sparkling stones from the bowels of the earth, and Sevres craftsmen gild white porcelain. Day and night, she dreams of new jewelry, vigilantly ensures that her dresses are starched, and her kerchiefs are gracefully thrown over. To strangers whose honors flatter her, whose desires enchant her, even if these strangers are deeply indifferent to her, she appears in all the splendor of her beauty and freshness. Hours, not occupied with caring for her own appearance and the pleasures of voluptuousness, she devotes to singing the most melodic arias: for her, the composers of France and Italy composed the most captivating concertos, and the Neapolitan musicians captured the harmony of the soul in the music of the strings. In short, such a woman is the queen of the world and the slave of desire. She is afraid of marriage, because it can spoil the waist, but agrees to it, because it promises happiness. She gives birth to children by pure chance, and when they grow up, hides them from the light.

Are the properties we have listed, chosen at random from a thousand others, inherent in those creatures whose hands are black like monkeys, and whose tanned cheeks resemble the parchments of an old Parisian parliament; those whose face is scorched by the sun and whose neck is wrinkled like a turkey's; those who wear rags, whose voice is hoarse, whose mind is insignificant, whose smell is unbearable; those who dream only of a piece of bread, who, without straightening their backs, hoe, harrow, turn hay, pick up spikelets, remove bread, knead the dough, shake the hemp; those who live in burrows barely covered with straw, mixed with cattle, children and men; those, finally, who do not care, from whom to give birth to children? The only calling of these beings is to produce as many sons and daughters as possible, doomed to drag out a life of poverty; as for love, for them, if not labor, like field work, then it is always a subject of bargaining.

Alas! if there are shopkeepers in the world who spend their days between a tallow candle and a loaf of sugar, farmers who milk cows, sufferers who work in factories or, like beasts of burden, wander along the roads with baskets, hoes and stalls; if, unfortunately, there is a whole crowd of vulgar creatures in the world for whom the life of the soul, the benefits of education, the delightful storms of the heart are an unattainable paradise, then the writer of Physiology cannot but classify them all as orangutans, even if nature has bestowed on them a hyoid bone, a beak-shaped the process of the scapula and thirty-two vertebrae! We write this book only for idle people, for those who have the time and desire to love, for the rich who have acquired ardent passions as their property, for minds that have a monopoly on chimeras. Cursed be all that is not given life by thought! Let's shout "cancer!" and even "rakalia" to all who are not hot, not young, not handsome and not passionate. In this way we will speak aloud the secret feelings of philanthropists who can read and ride in a carriage. Of course, the tax collector, the official, the legislator and the priest see our nine million outcast females as taxpayers, petitioners, subjects and flocks, but the feeling man, the boudoir philosopher, though not averse to tasting the bun baked by these creatures, will not include them, as we have already said, in the category of Women. Such a philosopher honors as women only those persons who can inspire love; worthy of attention - only those persons to whom a careful education has imparted a sacred ability to think, and an idle life has sharpened the imagination; finally, truly alive - only those persons whose soul seeks in love pleasures not only physical, but also spiritual.

Note, however, that nine million female pariahs continually give birth to peasant girls who, by a strange chance, grow up as beautiful as angels; these beauties settle in Paris and other large cities, where some of them eventually turn into society ladies; however, for two or three thousand of these chosen ones, there are hundreds of thousands of others whose destiny is to be servants or indulge in vile depravity. Nevertheless, we will include the rural marquis de Pompadour in the number of the female half of society.

Our first calculation comes from statistics, according to which there are eighteen million poor people, ten million rich people and two million rich people in France.

So, in France there are only six million women to whom men who know how to feel pay, pay and will pay attention.

Let us look at this chosen society through the eyes of a philosopher. We have the right to assume with a high degree of probability that spouses who have lived side by side for two decades can sleep peacefully without fear that their family peace will be violated by criminal passion and the shameful accusation of adultery. Therefore, out of six million women, about two million ladies must be subtracted, who are most amiable, because they had time to know what light is by the age of forty, but are not able to move anyone's heart and, therefore, are not subject to our consideration. If, despite all their courtesy, these ladies have the misfortune of not attracting anyone's attention, they are seized by boredom; they devote themselves to religion, cats and dogs, and offend no one but the Lord with their whims.

According to the calculations of the Bureau of Longitudes, we have to subtract from the total number of women two million pretty damned little girls; comprehending the basics of life, in their innocence they play with the boys, not suspecting that the young "husbands" who make them laugh today will make them shed tears tomorrow.

As a result of all the previous deductions, we get the figure of two million; What sensible reader would not agree that this number of women accounts for no less than a hundred thousand poor hunchbacked, ugly, consumptive, rickety, sick, blind, crippled, not rich, although excellently educated and for all these reasons, remaining in girls, and as a result of this in no way offending the sacred laws of marriage?

And would anyone argue with us if we say that another four hundred thousand girls enter the community of St. Camilla, become nuns, sisters of mercy, governesses, companions, etc.? To this sacred host we add those young persons who are already too old to play with the boys, but still too young to acquire garlands of orange blossom; the number of these young ladies cannot be precisely determined.

Finally, now that a million and a half women are left in our furnace, we will subtract another five hundred thousand from this number; so many, in our opinion, live in France the daughters of Baal, who delight the leisure of people who are not too picky. Moreover, without being afraid that kept women, milliners, saleswomen, haberdashers, actresses, singers, dancers, figurants, mistresses, maids, and so on. corrupt from such a neighborhood, we will enroll them all in the same category. Most of these persons arouse very passionate passions, but find it indecent to notify the notary, the mayor, the priest and secular scoffers about the day and hour when they give themselves to their lover. The way of life of these creatures, justly condemned by an inquisitive society, has the advantage that it relieves them of any obligations to men, Mr. Mayor and justice. These women do not violate any publicly sworn oaths, and therefore are not subject to consideration in our work devoted exclusively to legal marriage.

Our last discharge may seem too short to some, in contrast to the previous ones, which some amateurs may find too bloated. If someone so passionately loves a rich widow that he wants to include her in the remaining million, let him cross her out of the list of sisters of mercy, dancers or hunchbacks. In addition, in determining the number of women belonging to the latter category, we took into account that, as already mentioned, many peasant women join its ranks. The same is the case with working women and petty traders: women born into these two classes are the fruit of the efforts that nine million Two-armed female creatures make in order to rise to the highest strata of civilization. We were required to act with the utmost conscientiousness, otherwise many would consider our Reflection on Marriage Statistics to be a mere joke.

We thought of setting up a small stockpile of a hundred thousand, and putting there women who were in an intermediate position, such as widows, but in the end we felt that this would be too petty.

It is not difficult to prove the correctness of our calculations; a single argument is sufficient.

The life of a woman is divided into three completely different periods: the first begins with the cradle and ends when the girl enters marriageable age, the second is given over to marriage, the third comes when the woman reaches a critical age and Nature rather rudely reminds her that the time of passions has passed. These three spheres of existence are approximately equal in duration, and this gives us the right to divide the initial number of women into three equal parts. Scholars may count as they please, but we believe that out of six million women, a third will be girls from one year to eighteen years old, a third - women not younger than eighteen years old and not older than forty, and a third - old women. The vagaries of the social condition have divided two million women of marriageable age into three categories, namely, those who, for the reasons mentioned above, remain virgins, those whose virtue does not disturb their husbands much, and, finally, those , of which there are about a million and which we just have to deal with.

End of introductory segment.

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The following excerpt from the book Petty Annoyances of Married Life (compilation) (Honoré de Balzac, 1846) provided by our book partner -

A series: Culture of everyday life

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by the LitRes company.

"The Vicissitudes of Marriage": Balzac on marriage, family and adultery

Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) wrote all his life about marriage, about happy and unhappy marriages, about how a husband and wife should behave in order to maintain at least the appearance of peace in the house. In almost all the works included in the "Human Comedy" (and their total number, let me remind you, is close to a hundred), one of the heroes gets married, marries, cheats on his wife or husband. In 1978, the Swedish researcher Christina Wingard published the book Problems of Married Couples in Honore de Balzac's Human Comedy, based on statistical research. Wingard chose 96 couples in The Human Comedy, for whom it is known exactly how their union arose - for love or for convenience, and calculated how many of them Balzac allowed to live happily, and how many he condemned to suffering. It turned out that for 35 couples united for love, there are 61 marriages of convenience, and in the first category, 10 marriages can be considered completely successful, and in the second - 8 (such a small number of successes testifies not only to the writer's pessimistic view of modern marriage, but and about what he understood well: happiness cannot be described and is not interesting for description).

Balzac always wrote about marriage and adultery, but in those two works that are included in our collection, they are especially detailed. These works frame the work of Balzac. The Physiology of Marriage, published at the end of December 1829 with the date 1830 on the cover, became the second (after the novel The Last Chouan, or Brittany in 1800, published in the same 1829) work that Balzac was ready to recognize as his own. - in contrast to the numerous early novels published in the 1820s under pseudonyms. Moreover, if the first edition of "Chuan" did not justify the hopes of the author, then the "Physiology of Marriage" was a great and noisy success. The importance Balzac attached to Physiology is shown by the fact that when, in 1845, he began to sum up his work and draw up the final catalog of the Human Comedy, he placed it at the very end, in the section "Analytical Studies", crowning the whole huge structure. As for the Minor Troubles of Married Life, Balzac worked on them, intermittently, for many years, published them in parts, but they took their final book form in 1846, four years before the writer's death.

Each of the two works included in our collection has its own rather intricate creative history. Let's start with The Physiology of Marriage.

Balzac himself, two decades later, in the preface to A Treatise on Modern Stimulants (1839), wrote that the idea to write a book on marriage originated with him as early as 1820. In June 1826, he purchased a printing house in the Rue Marais Saint-Germain (he owned it until 1828), and already in July he filed a declaration of intention to print a book there called "Physiology of Marriage, or Reflections on Marital Happiness"; according to this declaration, the book was to be published in a thousand copies, but only a single copy has come down to us, printed, apparently, in August-September 1826, when the printing house had few orders. This early version, which consisted of thirteen Meditations and on which Balzac had been working since 1824, was not completed, but its text shows that in the mind of Balzac by this moment a plan of the whole work had already formed, quite close to the final version (in written chapters contain references to those that appeared only in the "Physiology" of 1829).

Biographical circumstances prompted Balzac to think about marriage and adultery. On the one hand, his mother was unfaithful to his father, and the fruit of one of her betrayals was Balzac's younger brother Henri, whom Madame de Balzac spoiled and openly preferred to other children: Honore and two daughters, Laure and Laurence. On the other hand, the twenty-three-year-old bachelor Honore de Balzac's mistress in 1822 was the forty-five-year-old Laura de Berni, a married woman, mother of nine children, very unhappy in a legal marriage.

Although something (apparently, urgent printing orders) distracted Balzac and he did not finish the book, the desire to complete the Physiology of Marriage did not leave the writer, and in the spring of 1829, after the release of The Last Chouan, he returned to work on it. In August, he already promised the publisher Levavasseur to finish the book by November 15th. In reality, by November 10, he had finished work on the first volume, which included 16 Meditations, which were a more or less thorough revision of the Physiology of 1826 (the original text was expanded mainly due to inserted short stories-anecdotes). Until December 15, that is, in almost one month (!), Balzac composed the entire second part of the book (Reflections from the 17th to the 30th, as well as the Introduction), and already on the 20th of December 1829 the book went on sale .

The title printed on its title page deserves a separate comment. It read: "The Physiology of Marriage, or Eclectic Reflections on the Joys and Sorrows of Married Life, Published by a Young Bachelor." Let's start from the end - with a reference to the "young bachelor." As you can see, the publication is anonymous, Balzac's name is not on the title page. However, this anonymity can be called illusory. Although in the preface to the first edition of "Shagreen Skin" (1831), Balzac himself wrote about "Physiology":

Some attribute it to an old doctor, others to a dissolute courtier of the time of Madame de Pompadour or a misanthrope who lost all illusions, because in his whole life he did not meet a single woman worthy of respect -

for literary circles, the authorship of Balzac was not a secret. In addition, he raises the mask in the very text of Physiology: in the first edition, under the "Introduction" was signed O. B ... k, and in the text the author mentions his patron, Saint Honore (p. 286). Balzac's initials are also mentioned in several book reviews that appeared in early 1830. The words "published by a young bachelor" have disappeared from subsequent editions; they were replaced by the traditional reference to Balzac as the author.

Now it is necessary to explain, firstly, why the word "Physiology" appears in the title of the book, which can arouse in readers the expectation of some really physiological revelations (expectations are not entirely justified, because, although Balzac repeatedly and quite clearly hints at the need not only moral, but there is still much more to sexual harmony between spouses, psychology and sociology in his book than physiology itself), and, secondly, why reflections are called "eclectic". Balzac owes both this and that to a book published four years earlier under the title "Physiology of Taste". But about it a little later, first you need to talk about other literary predecessors of the Physiology of Marriage.

In the second half of the 1820s, small-format books became widespread, on the covers of which there was the word “Code” (“Code of Conversation”, “Gallant Code”, etc.) or the expression “On Ways” to do this or that: “ On ways to tie a tie”, “On ways to get new Year gifts, but do not make them yourself, ”etc.). Publications of this type have been popular in France since the 18th century, but in the mid-1820s, the writer Horace-Napoleon Resson (1798-1854), who composed them himself or in collaboration, contributed to their popularity; one of his co-authors was Balzac, who wrote (by order and, possibly, with the participation of Resson) "The Code of Decent People, or On Ways not to Fall for the Swindlers" (1825). Taking as a model the Civil Code adopted in France in 1804 at the initiative of Napoleon, the authors of these books prescribed to readers (half in jest, but half in earnest) certain forms of behavior in society, explained how to behave at the ball and at the table, how to explain themselves in love, how to repay debts or borrow, and so on and so forth. From the Code of Polite Manners (1828) and the Code of Conversation (1829) one can learn a lot of useful and / or witty information: for example, that the width of the space between the address "Sir" and the text of the letter depends on the nobility of the addressee, or that good tone prescribes in no case should you enter into a conversation with fellow travelers in public transport, and even more so, do not scold the city authorities, because you can get yourself into big trouble, or that “a visit must be answered with a visit, like a slap in the face - with a blow of a sword.” The ratio of serious and playful changed from one "Code" to another; for example, the “Code of the Writer and Journalist” published in 1829 by the same Resson is formally a set of tips for those who want to earn a living by literary work, in fact, many of its pages are nothing more than a mockery of the genres and styles of modern literature . Balzac's "Physiology of Marriage" inherited from the "Codes" this combination (serious advice in a clownish presentation).

Among the popular themes of the "Codes" were marital relations. For example, in 1827, Charles Chabot published the book "Marriage Grammar, or Basic Principles By Which You Can Depart Your Wife, Teach Her To Run At The First Call, And Make Her Submissive To A Sheep, A Work Published By Lovlas's Cousin." And in May 1829, the “Marriage Code containing laws, rules, applications and examples of successful marriages and happy marriages” was published (in which, by the way, almost a third of the text consists of extensive quotations from the Napoleonic Civil Code). Resson's name was on the title page, but numerous coincidences with the "Physiology of Marriage" allowed researchers to assume that part of this book was corrected by Balzac, and part was written by himself (one of the most striking parallels is that in the "Marriage Code" a deceived husband is compared with a potential victim of the Minotaur, lying in wait for him in the bowels of the labyrinth; meanwhile, in the Physiology of Marriage, Balzac proposed the “scientific” neologism “minotavrised” to characterize deceived husbands). While working on the original "Physiology", Balzac, apparently, was thinking about the title "The Code of the Spouse, or On the Ways of Maintaining the Fidelity of His Wife"; in any case, such a sketch has been preserved among his papers.

The "Physiology of Marriage" grew out of the "Codes" but is strikingly different from them. To understand its originality, it is enough to compare it with the "Marriage Code" of 1829: against the background of the Balzac book, the "Marriage Code" looks like a script (not to say a brief retelling of the content) against the background of a novel. The author of the "Code" makes more or less successful, but not too deep jokes; Balzac also jokes, but his jokes are interspersed with deep and subtle reflections on human psychology. In addition, Balzac’s book has its own “plot”: from a wedding through various trials and attempts to avoid adultery, or at least delay it, to the era of “rewards” (although numerous digressions and inserted anecdotes are strung on this through line, nevertheless it is observed steadily ). Against this background, the "Code" is a clear fruit of what was called "bricolage" in the 20th century; short chapters are put one on top of the other in complete disarray, and then generally replaced by a long selection of articles of the Civil Code concerning marriage ties.

Another difference is also important: Balzac's book is called not "Code", but "Physiology", and not because in 1829 one "Marriage Code" was already out of print. And also not because the genre of the book was defined in this way: in 1829 the word "physiology" was not yet used as a genre designation for miniature illustrated descriptions of one or another human type, object or institution. Such "Physiology" began to appear ten years later than Balzac's book, and some of them ("Physiology of the wedding night", "Physiology of the doomed", "Physiology of the cuckold", etc.) developed its individual topics. Balzac titled his book The Physiology of Marriage primarily to refer the reader to another book, first published in December 1825, which became very popular almost immediately. This is the "Physiology of Taste", the author of which, Jean-Antelme Brillat-Savarin, in the form of a half-joking, half-serious treatise, tried to explore such an important area of human life as food.

The "Physiology of Marriage" owes a lot to the "Physiology of Taste", starting with the title and dividing not into chapters, but into "reflections" ( meditations), moreover, Balzac, like Brillat-Savarin, has exactly thirty of these “reflections” in the book. The author of the "Physiology of Taste" drew the term "reflections", of course, not from the sensational novelty of 1820 - "Poetic Meditations" ( Meditations poetiques) Lamartine, but from the much older Metaphysical Meditations ( Meditations metaphysiques) Descartes, published for the first time in 1641, but it can be assumed that Balzac, who in his "Physiology" refuses to follow the "romantics wrapped in a shroud" (p. 78), the use of this word not only emphasizes the continuity in relation to Brillat- Savarin, but also ironically over the fashionable Lamartine, because the subject of Balzac's "reflections" is not at all the same as that of the melancholic poet.

The "Physiology" of Brillat-Savarin, like the "Physiology" of Balzac, was published anonymously; on the title page of Brillat-Savarin’s book was put: “The work of a professor, a member of many learned societies”, Balzac took the place of the professor by a bachelor (“published by a young bachelor”). In addition, apparently, it is precisely in memory of Brillat-Savarin, who systematically called himself a professor in his book, and certified his book as the first attempt in gastronomic science, Balzac now and then calls himself a professor or doctor of marriage sciences, and his text - fruit scientific research. Balzac also borrowed some other tricks from Brillat-Savarin: the use of numbered aphorisms containing the quintessence of the author's wisdom (but they are collected from Brillat-Savarin at the beginning of the book, and from Balzac they are scattered throughout the text), and the testament of some topics to descendants. There is also a thematic relationship: the author of The Physiology of Taste bequeathed to future generations nothing more than the study of carnal love and the desire to procreate, that is, in a certain sense, the topic that the author of the Physiology of Marriage took up.

Finally, Brillat-Savarin, for greater scientificity, put in the subtitle of his "Physiology" the words "Reflections on transcendent gastronomy", and in this Balzac also follows in his footsteps: he calls his reflections "eclectic". In both cases, the authors ironically play with fashionable philosophical vocabulary: the epithet “transcendental” refers to the German philosophy of Kant or Schelling, which the French learned about from Ms. de Stael’s book “On Germany” (1813), and the term “eclectic” refers to lectures which the French philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867) read with great success at the Sorbonne, in particular in 1828–1829, on the eve of the publication of The Physiology of Marriage. However, in the "Physiology of Taste" there is just as little transcendence as in the "Physiology of Marriage" - eclecticism in Cousin's sense of the word. One can, of course, consider that Balzac is an "eclectic" in the sense that he constantly oscillates between a resolute condemnation of adultery and not too well-hidden sympathy for him, between the perception of a woman as an evil genius, all the forces of which are directed only towards one thing - to deceive her husband. , and sympathy for the "weaker sex", whose position in society is false and unfavorable. But it would be more correct to say that the references to eclecticism in the Physiology of Marriage are predominantly buffoonish and that Balzac simply does not miss an opportunity to laugh in scientific jargon; by the way, exactly the same function is performed by the references of this philosopher in the "Marriage Code": - on Cousin.

Although in the preamble to the "Treatise on Modern Stimulants" Balzac found it necessary to specifically emphasize that he had come up with his "Physiology" independently of Brillat-Savarin, he did not deny the similarity of the two books. In August 1829, when negotiating the almost immediate publication of the Physiology of Marriage, he wrote to the publisher Levavasseur that he required him to do “in three months what Brillat-Savarin spent ten years on.” The connection between the two "Physiology" was also emphasized in the 1838 edition of the Parisian publisher Charpentier, who almost simultaneously published the work of Brillat-Savarin in the same format. The countertitle of Balzac's book read:

This edition of the Physiology of Marriage is similar to Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste, recently published by the same publisher. These two publications should stand side by side on the bookshelves, as they have long been located side by side in the minds of people with intelligence and taste.

There was another reason for the reorientation from the "code" to "physiology": codes published in small format (in the eighteenth part of a sheet) were considered fashionable literature, but not serious; Balzac, following the example of Brillat-Savarin, published his book in the in-octavo format, reserved for serious publications.

If, however, formally both "Physiology" have a lot in common, then in terms of content Balzac wrote a completely different book, very far from the work of his predecessor. The image of the author in the "Physiology of Taste" is the image of a "magic assistant", referred to in the third person as a professor; he firmly believes that he has recipes and recommendations for all occasions: he knows how to cook, without cutting, a very large fish, and how to put on his feet a husband exhausted by an overly loving wife. His picture of the world is harmonious and optimistic: life is impossible without food, and the professor will teach you how to eat right and with pleasure. The Doctor of Marriage paints a far less radiant picture in The Physiology of Marriage. He sets out to tell husbands how to avoid “minotaurization”, that is, how not to be deceived by their own wives, and comes to the disappointing conclusion that adultery can only be delayed, and then mitigated by the “rewards” that a conscientious lover is obliged to console her husband.

However, the meaning of the word "Physiology" in the title of Balzac's book is not limited to a reference to the popular book by Brillat-Savarin. It also points to the scientific tradition to which Balzac declares himself to be an adherent - the materialistic tradition of the 18th century, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, its continuation in the works of such utopian thinkers as Fourier and Saint-Simon, who set themselves the task of apply natural scientific methods to the study of society and create a "social physiology" (Saint-Simon's term). In the article "On the Artists", published three months after the publication of "Physiology of Marriage", Balzac wrote about the "physiological analysis that made it possible to abandon systems for the sake of correlating and comparing facts." In fact, Balzac uses statistical data, divides the male and female parts of society into two categories “according to their mental abilities, moral properties and property status” (p. 81), in a word, carefully portrays that his text is not only witty chatter, but also a truly scientific essay, in which the reference to Buffon's Natural History is not just a figure of speech. However, the book contains quite different intonations. As far as intonations are concerned, Balzac is a true eclecticist, not in the Cousinian sense, but in the ordinary sense: in all the "reflections" of the book, accurate sociological observations coexist with Rabelaisian jeering, sound psychological recommendations coexist with mocking allusions. The book is full of quotations from the works of predecessors, both openly named (Rabelais, Stern, Diderot, Rousseau) and unnamed, and some sources were identified only during the preparation of this edition; for example, until now it was not known that Balzac very widely used in the "Physiology of Marriage" two works by the historian P. - E. Lemonte, bearing expressive titles: "Women's Observers, or an Accurate Account of What Happened at a Meeting of the Society of Observers for Women on Tuesday, November 2, 1802" and "A Moral and Physiological Parallel of Dance, Song and Drawing, which compares the influence of these three activities on women's ability to resist the temptations of love." Both of these works, although published in the 19th century (the first in 1803, and the second in 1816), in their spirit belong entirely to the previous century; a story about a meeting of a fictional learned society, a combination of scientific presentation with secular chatter - all these features of Lemonte's old-fashioned manner are well described by Pushkin's words: "remarkably subtle and clever, which is somewhat ridiculous today." However, Balzac inserts them into his text so organically that the "seams" are practically invisible.

Those aphorisms that are scattered throughout the book are also “eclectic”: Balzac calls them axioms, that is, centers of indisputable wisdom, but many of these axioms are paradoxical, ironic, brought to the point of absurdity and are not designed for a literal interpretation. For example: “A man does not have the right to marry without first studying the anatomy and without having made an autopsy of at least one woman” (p. 133) or: “A decent woman should have such a wealth that will allow her lover to be sure that she will never and in no way will not be a burden to him” (p. 96).

Finally, Balzac's attitude towards the two main "heroes" of the book is "eclectic": husband and wife, male and female.

Balzac himself wrote after the publication of The Physiology of Marriage that in this book he set out to "return to the thin, lively, mocking and cheerful literature of the eighteenth century, when the authors did not try to keep themselves straight and motionless." It is to this literature that the figure of a triumphant bachelor, a lover of pleasures, for whom a married woman is nothing more than a tasty prey, and a husband an annoying hindrance that must be eliminated, goes back. If the “eclectic” narrator passes from the point of view of a bachelor to the point of view of her husband, then the wife turns into an eternal enemy, striving to deceive her legal spouse at all costs, circle him around her finger, “minotaurize”, and the husband uses the widest range of means - from a special diet to thoughtful home decoration - in order to "neutralize" it. In any case, everything ends with the "Civil War" (the title of the third part of the Balzac book).

Thus, the "Physiology" can easily be considered directed against women; many readers both at the time of Balzac and later perceived it in this way; suffice it to recall with what hostility Simone de Beauvoir writes about the Balzac book and about the Balzac attitude towards women in The Second Sex (1949).

At first glance, in the "Physiology of Marriage" there really is much more irony towards women than sympathy for them, and often journalists (or rather, journalists) interpreted Balzac's subsequent works, praising a woman, as a way to ask for forgiveness for the "Physiology of Marriage", which outraged the entire female gender. Sensitive readers were shocked by this book. Balzac himself, not without causticity, described their reproaches in the preface to the novel "Father Goriot" (1835):

Not so long ago, the author was horrified to meet in the world an incredible, unexpected number of women who are sincerely virtuous, happy in their virtue, virtuous because they are happy, and no doubt happy because they are virtuous. During several days of rest, he only heard the flapping of unfolded white wings from all sides and saw fluttering angels dressed in robes of innocence, all of these were married persons, and they all reproached the author for endowing women with an immoderate passion for forbidden joys. marriage crisis, which received the scientific name from the author minotaurization. The reproaches were flattering to a certain extent for the author, for these women, prepared for the delights of heaven, admitted that they knew by hearsay the most disgusting little book, the terrifying "Physiology of Marriage", and used this expression to avoid the word "adultery", banished from the secular language.

But Balzac's attitude towards women in the "Physiology of Marriage" is by no means limited to ridicule and accusations of infidelity. Balzac's "eclecticism" implies a completely different attitude towards a woman. It was no coincidence that Balzac almost immediately gained a reputation as an author writing about women and for women. Critics regularly - although sometimes not without irony - reminded of the huge place women occupy in Balzac's work. Here is one of the typical characteristics. The Gallery of Press, Literature and Fine Arts wrote in 1839: “M. de Balzac invented women: a woman without a heart, a woman with a great heart, a woman of thirty, a woman of fifteen, a widowed and married woman, a weak and strong woman, a woman understood and misunderstood, a seduced and seductive woman, a touchy woman and a coquette woman. This idea that Balzac "invented women", about which no one before him had a clue, was constantly played out in the French press. However, Balzac not only invented them, but, according to his many readers, he understood them like no other. Contemporaries also often laughed at this inseparable connection between Balzac and the female audience. For example, in 1839, the Caricature newspaper (the same one that published fragments of the future Minor Troubles of Married Life in 1839-1840) described techniques for readers that " great person” allegedly arranges once a month in his country estate Jardi:

On this day, endless streams of women are drawn to him. The illustrious author receives them graciously and graciously, gives them a speech on the shortcomings of married life, and sends them back, bestowing upon each a blessing and a copy of the Physiology of Marriage.

This description is parodic, but Balzac's sympathy for women was quite serious.

When one of the first readers of Physiology, Zulma Carro, experienced "disgust" when reading its first pages, Balzac agreed that such a feeling "cannot fail to seize any innocent being when talking about a crime, seeing a misfortune, reading Juvenal or Rabelais ”, but assured his friend that in the future she would come to terms with the book, for she would find in it several “powerful speeches in defense of virtue and women».

Indeed, under the layer of jokes about adultery in the Physiology of Marriage, this second line is discernible, filled with deep sympathy for a woman (and in stories about women's infidelities one can see admiration for the female mind and female ingenuity). Balzac is undeniably on the side of women when he criticizes women's education, which makes girls dumb and does not allow their minds to develop. Or when he exhorts men: “Never start your married life with violence,” a thought he repeats in various ways in the Marriage Catechism:

The fate of a married couple is decided on their wedding night.

By depriving a woman of free will, you deprive her of the opportunity to make sacrifices.

In love, a woman - if we are talking not about the soul, but about the body - is like a lyre that reveals its secrets only to those who know how to play it (pp. 133-134).

Balzac explained his position on October 5, 1831 in a letter to the Marquise de Castries, who was shocked by the attitude of the author of The Physiology of Marriage to the female sex, which seemed to her rude and cynical. He explained to his correspondent that he undertook to compose this book in order to protect women, and chose the form of a buffoon, put on the mask of a misogynist only in order to draw attention to his ideas. “The meaning of my book is that it proves that their husbands are to blame for all the sins of women,” he wrote. In addition to husbands, Balzac also lays the blame on the social structure; he convincingly shows his imperfection, destructive primarily for women. He writes about women's infidelities: “Having openly named that secret disease that undermines the foundations of society, we pointed to its sources, among which are the imperfection of laws, the inconsistency of morals, the inflexibility of minds, the contradictory habits” (p. 157).

The fact that Balzac included the "Physiology of Marriage" in the "Analytical Studies" when drawing up the plan for the "Human Comedy" may cause bewilderment. It would seem that there are more witty aphorisms, spicy anecdotes and vaudeville scenes in this text than analysis. However, the author of "Physiology" not only tells, but also reflects, explains, looks for the roots of family troubles in the history of morals and the structure of society; in the words of one of the critics, he presents the world not only with a mirror, but also with a key. Therefore, those researchers who find in the "Physiology of Marriage" the history and sociology of marriage and adultery are right. It is no coincidence that in one of the articles of 1831 Balzac ranked his book, “destroying all illusions about marital happiness, the first of public goods”, to the same “school of disappointment”, in which he included, for example, Stendhal's Red and Black. In his understanding, The Physiology of Marriage is a highly serious and important book (although this seriousness is brightened up by a playful and buffoonish manner inherited from Rabelais and Stern).

In the "Physiology of Marriage" the author bequeaths to his descendants to write several works, for which he himself does not undertake now: 1) about courtesans; 2) about the seven principles on which love is based, and about pleasure; 3) about the upbringing of girls; 4) about ways to conceive beautiful children; 5) about chirology, that is, the science of the relationship between the shape of the hand and the character of a person; 6) about ways to compile "marriage astronomical tables" and determine "marriage time" (that is, the stage in which the relationship of these spouses is). He did not write such works, but these themes, as well as many others, were developed in his later work, with which The Physiology of Marriage is connected by diverse ties.

Above all, Balzac remained true to the general principles outlined in the book of 1829.

If in the "Physiology of Marriage" he exclaims: "Let the virtue of ten virgins perish, so long as the sacred crown of the mother of the family remains unstained!" (p. 152), then he remained faithful to this conviction (a girl has the right to sin, but a cheating wife is a criminal) all his life. In 1838, he wrote to Evelina Ganskaya: “I am entirely for the freedom of a young maiden and for the slavery of a woman, in other words, I want her to know what she is contracting for before marriage, to study everything first, to try all the possibilities provided by marriage, but, having signed contract, remained faithful to him. However, he himself did not follow this principle in his relations with the Ghanaian (married lady), and in the novels he showed that the fate of not only the unfaithful wife Julie d'Aiglemont ("The Thirty-Year-Old Woman") is tragic, but also the wife who remains faithful to her unloved husband (Madame de Mortsauf in "Lilies of the Valley").

If in the "Physiology of Marriage" Balzac insists that education should develop the mind of girls and that they should be given the opportunity to get to know their future spouse closely enough, then in the future he only allows couples where wives satisfy these conditions to be happy (for example, the title characters of the novels "Ursula Mirue" and "Modesta Mignon").

If in the Physiology of Marriage Balzac argues that girls should be given in marriage without a dowry, since in this case marriage would not be so much like a sale, then he repeats the same idea in many other works, for example, in the already mentioned cycle " Thirty-year-old woman" or in the story "Honorina".

If in the Physiology of Marriage he writes: “Since pleasure arises from the harmony of sensations and feelings, we dare to assert that pleasures are a kind of material ideas,” and insists on the need to investigate the ability of the soul “to move separately from the body, to be transported to any point on earth ball and see without the help of the organs of vision” (p. 134, 422), then this can be considered a summary of the theory of the materiality of ideas and “fluids”, which he preached all his life and which, in particular, determined the presence in his novels and stories of numerous clairvoyants and mediums. Only the intonations and contexts in which such phenomena are described differ: in The Physiology of Marriage, serious statements are hidden among Rabelaisian and Sternian jokes, and, for example, in Shagreen Skin, published two years later, the materiality of the idea becomes the basis of a tragic plot.

If in The Physiology of Marriage Balzac remarks: “Finally, the matter is completely hopeless if your wife is under seventeen years old or if her face is pale, bloodless: such women are most often cunning and treacherous” (p. 156), then this portends countless passages of the "Human Comedy", where the author, following in the footsteps of the deeply revered creator of physiognomy Lavater, predicts the character's character by external signs. All this is already programmed in the reflection "On Customs Inspection", where Balzac gives numerous signs by which a shrewd husband can determine the relationship of a single guest to the hostess of the house:

Everything is fulfilled: he smoothes his hair or, running his fingers through his hair, whips up a fashionable cook ‹…› whether he stealthily makes sure whether the wig fits well and what kind of wig it is - light or dark, curled or smooth; whether he glances at his nails to make sure they are clean and neatly trimmed‹…› whether he hesitates before calling, or whether he pulls the string at once, quickly, casually, cheekily, with infinite self-confidence; whether it rings timidly, so that the sound of the bell immediately fades away, like the first strike of a bell calling the Franciscan monks to prayer on a winter morning, or sharply, several times in a row, angry at the sluggishness of the footman (pp. 257-258).

If in the "Physiology of Marriage", in the same chapter "On Customs Examination", the rich prey that the Parisian streets provide for astute flaneur observers is described, then similar observations can be found in almost all "Scenes of Parisian Life". Let us add that the very definition of flanking - a pastime that Balzac valued extremely highly - was already given in the Physiology of Marriage:

Oh, these wanderings around Paris, how much charm and magic they bring to life! Flanking is a whole science, flanking delights the eyes of the artist, as a meal delights the taste of a glutton. ‹…› To plan means to enjoy, to memorize sharp words, to admire majestic pictures of misfortune, love, joy, flattering or caricatured portraits; it means immersing one's gaze into the depths of a thousand hearts; for a young man to flirt means to desire everything and master everything; for an old man, to live the life of young men, imbued with their passions (pp. 92–93).

Finally, in subsequent works, not only general principles, but also individual motifs are continued and developed. For example, the exploitation of migraine, a malady that brings innumerable benefits to a woman and is so easy to feign, is described in great detail in the second chapter of the novel The Duchess de Langeais (1834). The comparison of carnal love with hunger (pp. 108-109) is repeated in many novels and in a particularly extended form in Cousin Bette (1846):

A virtuous and worthy woman can be compared to a Homeric meal cooked without fuss on hot coals. The courtesan, on the other hand, is, as it were, the work of Karem [the famous chef] with all sorts of spices and exquisite seasonings.

And the harmful influence on the life of the spouses of such a character in the family drama as the mother-in-law lies at the heart of the novel The Marriage Contract (1835).

In The Minor Troubles of Married Life, Balzac offered an expressive formula for describing the literary process: “Some authors color books, while others sometimes borrow this coloring. Some books molt onto others” (p. 576). So, using this formula, we can say that the "Physiology of Marriage" "shed" on a lot of Balzac's further works.

In the press behind "The Physiology of Marriage" with light hand Jules Janin, the author of a review in the newspaper "Journal de Debat" dated February 7, 1830, the epithet "infernal" was fixed; however, the author himself suggested in the "Introduction" that he would be suspected "of immorality and malice", and he himself mentioned Mephistopheles there. The reputation of the Balzac book is also given by the scene in the secular living room, captured in Pushkin's unfinished excerpt "We spent the evening at the dacha ..."; here the prim guest-widow asks not to tell an indecent story, and the hostess of the house replies impatiently:

Completeness. Qui est-ce donc que l'on trompe ici? [Who is being fooled here? - fr.] Yesterday we watched Antony [drama by A. Dumas], and over there on my fireplace lay La Physiologie du mariage [Physiology of marriage. - fr.]. Indecent! Found something to scare us!

This reputation remained with the book in subsequent years. The Catholic newspaper Censored Bulletin, which offered its readers (priests, teachers, librarians) recommendations on separating well-meaning literature from obscene literature, in the summer of 1843 called Physiology a "dirty pamphlet", the reading of which "should be strictly forbidden to all classes, in the first head to young men and women."

However, this “doubtful” reputation did not interfere with the publishing fate of the “Physiology of Marriage” in France. The book, which glorified the author immediately after the release of the first edition, was repeatedly reprinted both during the life of Balzac and after his death. In the edition of The Human Comedy published by Furne, Duboche and Etzel, as already mentioned, she entered the section "Analytical Studies" (volume 16, published in August 1846). Unlike his other works, Balzac's "Physiology" almost did not correct when included in the "Human Comedy", so there are not very many differences between the first edition and the text included in Furn's edition; Balzac also made very few corrections to his copy of this edition (the so-called "corrected Fürn").

If the history of the text of "Physiology of Marriage" is quite simple, then with the second work included in our collection, the situation is much more complicated.

The Minor Troubles of Married Life was first published as a separate edition by Adam Khlendowski in 1846.

However, this event was preceded by a long and complicated history; of the 38 chapters of the book, only one (the first preface) was never published before the publication of Khlendowski's edition. All the rest had already been published before in various editions, although Balzac subjected them to more or less serious revisions when they were included in the final version (the most significant of these changes are noted in our notes).

The first sketches date back to 1830: on November 4, 1830, in the first issue of the weekly Caricature, an essay “Neighbours” was published signed by Henri B ... - the story of a stockbroker's wife, who, due to the tightness of Parisian housing, became a witness to a marital, as it seemed to her , the happiness of the neighbors is opposite, and then it turned out that the blond young man with whom the neighbor is so happy is not her husband at all (this story, in a slightly modified form, later turned into the chapter “French Campaign”). A week later, on November 11, 1830, Balzac published under the signature of Alfred Coudreux (one of his then pseudonyms) in the same weekly an essay “The Visit of the Doctor”, which outlined the main lines of the future chapter “Solo for the Hearse”.

The next step on the way to a separate edition of The Troubles was a series of 11 essays, published in the weekly Caricature from September 29, 1839 to June 28, 1840. The cycle is titled "The Minor Troubles of Married Life". Word used in title miseres(trouble, adversity) has a long history. From the beginning of the 18th century in France, in the popular "blue library" (so called by the color of the covers), stories were printed for the common people in verse and prose about miseres various artisans. Each book was dedicated misere of any one craft, but they were perceived as a series, and sometimes they were combined under one cover (for example, in the book of 1783 "The Adversities of the Human Race, or Funny Complaints regarding the teaching of various arts and crafts in the city of Paris and its environs"). Names with the word miseres remained in use in the 19th century: for example, in 1821, Scribe and Melville composed the vaudeville comedy The Minor Troubles of Human Life, and in 1828 Henri Monnier, whom Balzac highly appreciated, released a series of five lithographs under the general title Petty Troubles human" ("Petites misères humaines"). By the way, Balzac himself used the word miseres not only in the title of "Petty Troubles": let me remind you that the novel that is known to the Russian reader as "The Shine and Poverty of the Courtesans" is called in French "Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes".

The essays included in the first Troubles of 1839 had no headings, but were numbered. When included in the final text, Balzac reversed their order and gave each a title; these are the chapters of “Cheaking”, “Discoveries”, “Resolution”, “Women's Logic”, “Memories and Regrets”, “An Unexpected Blow”, “The Sufferings of a Simple Soul”, “Amadis Omnibus”, “Caring of a Young Wife”, “§ 2. Variation on the same theme" from the chapter "Deceived ambition" and "Women's Jesuitism". In these essays, the main characters are named Adolf and Caroline. In April 1841, Balzac entered into an agreement with the publisher Sovereign to issue essays from the second "Caricature" in a separate edition; to them he was going to add a short story, first published in August 1840 under the title "Fantasies of Claudine", but in November 1841 the contract was terminated.

In December 1843, Balzac, as usual in dire need of money, concluded with another publisher, Pierre-Jules Etzel (with whom he actively collaborated in 1841-1842, when he composed stories for the collection Scenes of the Private and Public Life of Animals), an agreement to a text called "What Parisian Women Like", which Etzel was going to include in the collection "The Devil in Paris" that he was preparing at that time. In a letter to Evelina Ganskaya dated December 11, 1843, Balzac explained that this text, consisting of nine "minor troubles of married life," would be the end of a book already begun, which he intended to publish in a new edition of "Physiology of Marriage". The agreement with Etzel allowed Balzac to publish new texts outside of his collection, but under a different title, and this title should have been "The Minor Troubles of Married Life." However, the title “What the Parisians Like,” indicated in the contract with Etzel, was subsequently changed, and in six issues of “The Demon in Paris”, which came out of print in August 1844, ten more sketches of the future “Troubles” appeared under the general title “Philosophy married life in Paris. In the final edition, these essays became the following chapters: Observation, The Mating Horsefly, Hard Labor, Yellow Smiles, Nosography of the Villa, Trouble from Trouble, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Married Life, The Art of Being victim", "French campaign", "Solo for the hearse" (two essays, which, as already mentioned, were originally published in 1830) and, finally, the last chapter "An interpretation explaining what felicità means in operatic finales ". Although Balzac worked on these chapters in very difficult conditions, overcoming severe headaches, the text came out light and witty and, as the author himself stated in a letter to Ganskaya dated August 30, 1844, was a great success. Therefore, Etzel decided to publish it separately. This book was first, from July to November 1845, published again in the form of separate issues under the same title that was used inside The Demon in Paris (Philosophy of Married Life in Paris), and then came out in the form of a booklet with dated 1846 and under the title "Paris in marriage. Philosophy of Married Life”, given by analogy with the books “Paris on the Water” and “Paris at the Table” by Eugène Briffaut published in the same series. The originality of this edition is not the text (Balzac did not correct it), but Gavarni's illustrations; on the cover of both individual issues and the entire book, these illustrations were called "comments": "with Gavarni's comments."

Meanwhile, on February 25, 1845, Balzac signed an agreement with Adam Khlendovsky and granted him the right to publish, first in separate editions, and then in the form of a book, an essay entitled “Minor Troubles of Married Life”, which will include parts already printed, including the one that appeared in “ Bese in Paris”, as well as new chapters, which Balzac undertook to present in three months, but in reality he did it a little later. As we can see, Balzac returned to the title "Little Annoyances of Married Life", first used in 1839-1840; its "commercial value" was increased by the success of the book The Minor Troubles of Human Life, published in 1843 with text by Old Nick (a pseudonym for Emile Forg) and illustrations by Granville. The first issue of Khlendowski's edition was published on July 26, 1845; Khlendowski began printing from ready-made texts, drawn first from the "Caricature" of 1839-1840, and then from "The Demon in Paris". In the meantime, Balzac had returned to Paris from a trip to Europe, and in September began composing the last movement. In the final edition, these essays became the chapters of the second part: "Second Preface", "Husbands in Two Months", "Deceived Ambition", "Idleness", "Indiscretions", "Rough Revelations", "Delayed Bliss", "Vain Trouble ”, “Smoke without fire”, “Home tyrant”, “Confessions”, “Humiliations”, “Last quarrel”, “Failure”, “Chestnuts from fire”, “Ultima ratio”. Balzac first published them under the general title "Small troubles of married life" on December 2-7, 1845 in six issues of the newspaper "Press", in order to then provide Khlendovsky. The publication is preceded by a short preface by Theophile Gauthier, explaining that the published chapters serve as a continuation of those already published by Khlendowski, and also that in this part the roles have changed and the woman has turned from a tormentor into a martyr.

Balzac read the layout of all these elements of a separate edition and made corrections there until the beginning of 1846. Issues of Chlendowski went out of print until the beginning of July 1846, and soon (the exact date is unknown, since this book was not announced in the weekly Bibliographie de la France) a separate edition came out with 50 engravings and two and a half hundred drawings in the text, initial letters etc. by Bertal. Balzac made some corrections to his copy with the expectation of a reprint, but it was never published during his lifetime. In the same 1846, but a little earlier (apparently, in May-June), another, this time unillustrated separate edition of The Troubles, was also published, also not announced in the Bibliographie de la France, but, unlike Khlendovsky's publications, which were not published under the control of Balzac. The fact is that back in September 1845, financial difficulties forced Khlendovsky to cede part of the rights to the future edition of The Troubles to the publishers Ru and Cassana and their printer Alfred Mussen. Balzac did not like this deal, but he could not resist it, however, he did not take part in the preparation of this edition, and therefore, although it went out of print earlier than Khlendovsky's edition, it is this latter that is considered the original edition of "Troubles". On the title page of Roux and Cassane's edition, "Physiology of Marriage: Minor Troubles of Marriage" was displayed, but the text of "Physiology" was not printed in it and its title was used solely to attract reader interest, and also, possibly, to hint at the connection of the new book with the "physiology" of the early 1840s.

Judging by the agreement with Khlendowski, Balzac intended to publish Troubles "as part of the Physiology of Marriage". And from a legal document that Balzac received on November 22, 1845 from the printer Moussen (this was the so-called "warning for the debtor" about the need to fulfill debt obligations), it is known that Khlendowski received permission from Balzac to publish The Troubles as volumes three and four. "The Physiology of Marriage".

Nevertheless, Khlendovsky did not carry out this intention; similarly, in the last, 16th volume of the first edition of The Human Comedy, published in August 1846, only one such "etude" was included in the section "Analytical Studies", namely "The Physiology of Marriage". Perhaps the reason is that this edition was being prepared in the spring of 1846, when Balzac traveled with Hanska through Italy and Switzerland and could not make the corrections necessary to combine the two texts in one section of the Human Comedy. However, both the letter to Ganskaya and the agreement with Khlendovsky testify that the union of the two texts was part of the writer's plans. True, in the catalog that he compiled in 1845 for the second edition of The Human Comedy, "The Troubles" are not mentioned. However, this can be explained simply by the fact that Balzac planned to print them not separately, but as part of the Physiology of Marriage. And their planned inclusion in the Human Comedy can be judged, in particular, by the text itself: writing the last portion of essays for the Press, Balzac introduced into it the names of some “recurring characters” that appear in many works of the Human Comedy ; it is clear that in this way he wanted to "tie" the "Trouble" to its main body. In addition, in the text of The Troubles there are direct indications of the relationship of the two texts: in the chapter "Ultima ratio" Balzac notes that this work "belongs to the Physiology of Marriage, as History to Philosophy, as Fact to Theory" (p. 677 ). There are several other references in the text to the "vile principles of the Physiology of Marriage" (they are noted in our notes). Finally, even more convincing is the reference to the correction that Balzac made in 1846 in the Physiology of Marriage: in several places he introduced the names of Adolphe, Caroline, and even Madame de Fishtaminel into the text, which were not in previous editions. The connection with the "Physiology of Marriage" was also indicated by an advertising brochure for Khlendovsky's publication, issued in 1846, where two Balzac books on marriage were called "the alpha and omega of marriage."

Therefore, the decision of the publisher Ussieux was quite logical, who, in his edition of The Human Comedy (vol. XVIII, 1855), was the first to include The Troubles in the section Analytical Studies, where they follow the Physiology of Marriage.

Ussieux did not have access to the author's copy of Khlendovsky's edition, where Balzac, as already mentioned, made some corrections, and considered it more correct to insert into his edition some passages from the version of the text that was printed in the collection "The Demon in Paris" (which is why in Ussieux's edition, The Troubles has a different ending). However, since the corrected copy of Khlendovsky's edition should be considered the expression of the last author's will, Jean-Louis Tritter, the publisher of this text in the authoritative edition of the Pleiades Library, chose it for reproduction, and our translation is based on this edition.

Researchers of the female fate in The Human Comedy and Balzac's attitude towards a woman come to the conclusion that in his mind there was a kind of utopia - the idea of an ideal marriage: he considered this establishment necessary, but wished that it was based on both reason and love. Balzac was clearly aware of the utopian nature of such an ideal, but he was no less clearly aware of something else: reason without passion cannot bring absolute happiness to a woman in marriage, just like passion without reason. The novel “Memoirs of Two Young Wives” (1842) is devoted to the proof of this thesis. brought herself to death), and the other, Rene, marries for convenience and, not loving her husband, devotes herself entirely to children, thus trying to make up for the passion that is missing in her marriage. Both happen to experience moments of happiness, but the fate of neither one nor the other can not be called happy.

In this and other novels specifically devoted to family life, Balzac considers extreme "romantic" situations; fatal passions boil here, intrigues are started, grandiose plans are nurtured. Here the great tragedies of married life take place. But great tragedies do not happen to everyone, and generally occur mainly in novels. And how does the daily life of ordinary spouses go, what prevents them from being happy? The book, which Balzac entitled "The Petty Troubles of Married Life," is precisely about this, and therefore it is easier for the reader to identify himself with its heroes. It is easier even today, two hundred years later. Of course, everything takes place in ancient scenery and ancient costumes, but the ratio of characters in a family drama or comedy remains the same.

This relevance of "Petty Troubles" is greatly facilitated by their original device.

It has already been said above that almost all of Balzac's novels and short stories are devoted to marriage to one degree or another, but the novels are about the stories of specific married couples, and this gives the reader the opportunity to think that the fate of this unhappy couple is not the rule, but the exception. . True, even the Physiology of Marriage left few illusions in this regard, since, talking about wives who are bored with marriage, implicitly, and sometimes directly announced to every husband: it will be the same with you. But in Minor Troubles, Balzac went even further: in the book there are two main characters, Adolf and Caroline, but these are not heroes at all in the classical sense of the word, with a certain appearance and a certain character. At the very beginning of the book, the author introduces his character as follows:

Maybe he is a solicitor at the court of first instance, maybe a captain of the second rank, or maybe a third-class engineer or assistant judge, or, finally, a young viscount. But most likely, this is the groom that all sane parents dream of, the limit of their dreams is the only son of a rich father!

And in the newspaper "Press" on December 2, 1845, a note was made to the publication of the chapter "Deceived ambition":

Caroline in this book embodies the typical wife, and Adolf the typical husband; the author treated husbands and wives as fashion magazines treat dresses; he created mannequins.

In French, the article is not used before proper names, but Balzac sometimes adds an indefinite article to the names of the main characters of "Little Troubles" and calls them: un Adolphe, une Caroline, that is, one of the Adolfs, one of the Carolines; in other places demonstrative pronouns are added to the same names: this Adolf, this Carolina. The lover of any Carolina is certainly called Ferdinand (only their serial numbers change: Ferdinand II follows Ferdinand I). Commentators note chronological or biographical inconsistencies in the text: first, Carolina is the only daughter, and on the next page she suddenly has a sister, Carolina of the first part was born in Paris, and Carolina of the second part is a provincial, Adolf of the first part is most likely a rentier, and in the second part he is secondary a writer, Carolina is either a coquette and a fashionista, or a pilgrim and a hypocrite. In the chapter "Deceived Ambition" Adolf himself bears the name Shodorey, and this Adolf Shodorey publishes a newspaper; and a little lower, in the chapter "Rough Revelations", the husband Adolf and the newspaperman Shodorey turn out to be two different persons. It would be easy to attribute these inconsistencies to the fragmentation of the book, which was created in a hurry and in parts, but I think that is not the point at all. If The Physiology of Marriage, for all its novelty, in terms of genre owed much to the previous Codes and was generally full of borrowings from the literature of the 18th century and earlier eras, then Minor Troubles is an experimental book; it is not for nothing that a modern researcher mentions Pirandello's play Six Characters in Search of an Author in connection with it, and a modern researcher generally calls this book a harbinger of the French Workshop of Potential Literature (OULIPO) founded in 1960.

In fact, one of the most prominent members of this group, the great inventor Raymond Queneau, wrote in 1967 a small work entitled "A Tale to Your Taste," in which the reader is first left to choose whom he wants to see her heroes: three small peas, three long poles or three frail bushes, and then determine their further actions. Now, Balzac, one hundred and twenty years before Queneau, grants his reader a similar freedom.

The remark of the husband, who evaluates the appearance of his wife before going to the ball, is conveyed as follows:

“I have never seen you so beautifully dressed. “Blue, pink, yellow, crimson (choose it yourself) surprisingly suits you” (p. 500).

A line from a husband telling his wife about a supposedly profitable business venture he is about to invest in is:

“You wanted it! You wanted it! You told me that! You told me that!..” In a word, in the twinkling of an eye you enumerate all the fantasies with which she tore your heart so many times (p. 514)—

but the fantasies themselves are again left to the discretion of the reader. And when it comes to the note found by the wife and allowing her to convict her husband of treason, Balzac immediately cites four variants of this love message:

The first note was composed by a grisette, the second by a noble lady, the third by a pretentious bourgeois, the fourth by an actress; from among these women, Adolf chooses his beauties(p. 659).

This “variability” of “Little Troubles” reminds us of what is often forgotten: for all the traditional nature of the literary genres in which he worked (novel, short story), Balzac was a real innovator; the system of recurring characters, passing from one work to another, in the form that he invented and developed, was also ahead of its time and predicted some of the discoveries of modernism: after all, Balzac builds the biography of his characters non-linearly, often violating the chronology and leaving the reader to restore the missing links himself.

However, Balzac “predicts” not only modernism and postmodernism of the 20th century, but also literature closer to his era. When reading some passages of Minor Troubles, it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that the future Anna Karenina is laid down here in a folded form: “All women must remember this nasty petty trouble - the last quarrel that often breaks out over a mere trifle , and even more often - because of an indisputable fact, because of irrefutable evidence. This cruel farewell to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue itself, is perhaps as whimsical as life itself. Like life itself, it flows in every family in its own special way."(p. 658; italics mine. - V. M.) - and in another place: “Adolf, like all men, finds solace in public life: he travels, fusses, does business. But for Caroline, it all comes down to one thing: to love or not to love, to be or not to be loved” (p. 620). I don’t presume to say that Tolstoy remembered Minor Troubles when he composed his novel, but in general he was well acquainted with the works of Balzac, although he spoke of him, like many other authors, contradictorily, ranging from “nonsense” to “ great talent."

Of course, variation within the same social or occupational type was also developed by the above-mentioned humorous "physiology" of the early 1840s. For example, in the short chapters of The Physiology of a Married Man (1842), composed by the famous author of popular novels Paul de Kock, the types of spouses are described: jealous, picky, overly caring, affectionate in public, but unbearable behind closed doors, etc. However, all these husbands are presented to the reader as totally different, Balzac's Adolf, although he accommodates many different husbands, at the same time, paradoxically, remains the same character.

Another original feature of "Petty Troubles" is that this book is "bisexual".

Although in the Physiology of Marriage, as already mentioned, many pages are imbued with sympathy for a woman, nevertheless, formally this book is written from the beginning to the end from the point of view of a man; this is a guide for a husband on how not to become a cuckold. "Minor troubles", despite many coincidences of individual plots (such as, for example, the relationship of an allegedly ill wife with a doctor or a story about the power of a female "ratchet"), are constructed differently. At the beginning of the second part, Balzac openly announces his intention to respect the interests of both sexes in his book and make it "more or less a hermaphrodite." Balzac insisted on this “hermaphroditism” of “Little Troubles” starting from the end of the 1830s, but he thought of the forms of its embodiment in different ways. On November 3, 1839, in the newspaper Caricature, before the next fragment of Troubles, the following half-joking, half-serious note was printed explaining the author's intentions (obviously with his knowledge):

However, in the publication of Caricature, this principle is not fully maintained; of the eleven essays, only three represent a female point of view. In the final version, Balzac chose a different path: not the alternation of women's and men's chapters, but the division of the entire book into two parts, or, to pick up the "bath" metaphor, into two sections - male and female. In the middle of the text, in the “Second Preface,” he admits that his book has two halves, male and female: “after all, in order to fully resemble marriage, this book must become more or less hermaphrodite.” Diderot in the article “On Women”, which Balzac repeatedly quotes in “Physiology of Marriage”, reproaches the author of the book “Experience on the Character, Morals and Spirit of Women in Different Ages” (1772) A. - L. Thomas that his book “ has no gender: it is a hermaphrodite who has neither male strength nor female softness”, that is, he uses the word “hermaphrodite” in relation to the book with a disapproving assessment; Balzac, on the contrary, sees in the "hermaphroditism" of his book its advantage. The playful “hermaphrodite” in this sense fully corresponds to the serious hermaphrodite - Seraphite, the heroine of the novel of the same name (1834), a fantastic creature in which not only human and angelic properties are mixed, but also male and female principles. Seraphite is the embodiment of a single humanity, cleansed of filth; however, to ordinary people, she appears in a form accessible to their senses: to women in the form of a male Seraphitus, and to men in the form of a female Seraphite. Of course, from these mystical visions to the ironic sketches of Minor Troubles, there is a very long distance. Nevertheless, "bisexuality" is the structure-forming and content basis of the book. Indeed, if in the first part the wife appears mainly in the role of a stupid, quarrelsome and absurd fury, then the second part shows how disgusting husbands sometimes behave and how many small, but highly sensitive troubles they can deliver to their unfortunate wives with rudeness and insensitivity. , lack of talent and infidelity.

Balzac scholars tend to speak of The Minor Troubles as a book that is bleak, disillusioned, and cruel to married life. Arlette Michel, author of a dissertation on love and marriage in The Human Comedy, writes that if The Physiology of Marriage is the book of a man who can sneer at marriage as it is because he believes in the institution itself, then Minor Troubles is the book of a man who does not believe in marriage at all, and therefore his ridicule takes on a hopelessly cynical character. Here a modern researcher almost literally repeats what well-intentioned contemporary critics wrote about "Little Troubles"; The Catholic Censorship Bulletin of February 1846 condemned Balzac's new work in the following words:

there is nothing sadder and harder to read than this account of social plagues, examined with the coolness with which a chemist studies poison, and reduced to algebraic formulas and axioms, the last of which we cannot possibly agree with.

This last axiom says: "Only those couples are happy who arranged for themselves a marriage of four."

In my opinion, the situation in Minor Troubles is not at all so bleak. Although the prospectus for Khlendowski’s edition emphasizes the “combat” component of the book: “France, whose vocation is war, turned marriage into battle,” in fact, “Minor Troubles” to a much greater extent than “Physiology of Marriage” is a book about ways to achieve marital peace, about how spouses grow old together, if not in love, then at least in harmony. The husband from the "Physiology of Marriage" will not come up with the question: how to please his wife? how to guess “her feelings, whims and desires (three words for the same thing!)” (p. 540). It would never occur to a wife from The Physiology of Marriage to please her husband with his favorite "Italian champignons" (p. 637). The feeling of joylessness when reading "Petty Troubles" arises, perhaps, because, as the Balzac scholar Roland Chollet subtly noted, this book differs sharply from all other works of the "Human Comedy" by the mediocrity of its characters. Balzac's favorite heroes are creators, geniuses, giants, people embraced by the strongest, even pernicious passion; but in Small Misfortunes, things are different: this book is about mediocrity. Even in The Physiology of Marriage, Balzac mentions "an outstanding man for whom this book was written" and thus raises the bar. In "Petty Troubles" he omits it: both troubles are small, and Adolf is nothing more than a kind of "provincial celebrity in Paris" - a mediocre writer who has neither the poetic gift nor the strong feelings that distinguished Lucien de Rubempré, the hero of the eponymous part of the novel "The Lost illusions" (1839).

But in this way both the characters and their problems become closer to the "average reader". Marital disputes about the upbringing of the child; a husband who every minute pesters his wife with the question: “What are you doing?”; indelicate husbands who, in front of everyone, call their wife “mommy”, “pussy” or “peach”, and wives who harass their husbands with reproaches and suspicions - all this, it would seem, is trifles (as it was said), but they are sometimes capable of ruining life not worse than other tragic events. The loose construction of Minor Troubles, where the characters are mannequins with no particular habits, with whom it is especially easy for every reader to identify, makes this book instructive without being tedious. A possible identification is also facilitated by the fact that almost the entire book is in the present tense: this is not a story about the completed story of a specific character with a specific character, it is an ever-lasting story of “everyone and everyone”, an empty frame into which everyone can insert their face. To an even greater extent than The Physiology of Marriage, Minor Troubles is a kind of manual on the practical psychology of family life, only, unlike many manuals written by professional scientists, it is witty and brilliant.

A few words about the Russian fate of both works included in our collection.

If in France the publishing history of the "Physiology of Marriage" developed, as mentioned above, very happily, then in Russia the situation was different. The first translation into Russian of a fragment from The Physiology of Marriage (and from the works of Balzac in general) was published in the Ladies' Journal under the title Migraine (the text is taken from the first paragraph of Meditation XXVI "On Various Types of Weapons"). The censorship of this issue is dated March 8, 1830. At that moment, The Physiology of Marriage was still an absolute novelty. Under the text of the Russian publication is displayed: "From Physiologie du mariage". The author is not specified, and this is quite natural. By that time, Balzac had signed with his own name a single novel, The Last Chouan, and although, as mentioned above, the name of the author of Physiology was not a mystery to the French public, he might not have been known in Russia yet. Almost simultaneously, less than a month later, the following note appeared in the Galatea magazine (censored on April 2, 1830) in the Mixture section:

They say that the following terrible incident happened recently in Paris: a noble lady became desperately ill in the past month; relatives gathered at her bedside. It's midnight; the general silence was interrupted by the wheezing of the dying woman and the crackling of firewood burning in the fireplace. Suddenly, burning coal is thrown out of the fireplace with a crack into the middle of the parquet; the dying woman suddenly screams, opens her eyes, jumps out of bed and, seizing coal with tongs, throws it into the fireplace; having made such a strain, she falls unconscious on the floor; they lift her up and carry her to her bed, where she soon died. Relatives, looking significantly at each other and then at the black spot left on the parquet from coal, ordered to immediately break open the floor, from under which they took out the box. But what was their surprise when, having opened it, they found in it the dead head of the wife of the deceased, about whom they still thought that he had remained in Spain!

The note is presented as a real incident, about which Russian magazines of that time in the “Mixture” section told in a multitude; so, on the adjacent pages of Galatea we find stories about a young man from Seville, who “like owls, bats, etc., sees only at night, and goes out with a guide during the day”, and about the “terrible bandit Gasparoni” sitting in a Roman prison who "killed 143 people." Neither Balzac nor the Physiology of Marriage are mentioned in Galatea; meanwhile, it is obvious that the anecdote about the incident in Ghent from the "Introduction" to "Physiology" (see pp. 60-61) served as a source for it. The anonymous Russian transcriber omitted everything that later served as a hallmark of the Balzac manner and aroused admiration in some readers, and sharp rejection in others, namely, a passion for details in descriptions (what Pushkin called "the short-sighted pettiness of French novelists"). In a note from Galatea, in essence, only the plot of Balzac's story is retold. Based on this, it can be assumed that the Galatea employee was not even guided directly by Balzac's book, but by a concise retelling of this episode in a review of it by Jules Janin, published in the Journal de Debas on February 7, 1830.

Then, for several decades, the history of the Russian "Physiology of Marriage" was completely interrupted. In 1900, the journal "Bulletin of Foreign Literature" published a translation by V. L. Rantsov; Rantsov translated the book from beginning to end, but released some paragraphs of the original, such as Rabelaisian passages from Meditation I, and in some places subjected Balzac's text to moral "censorship": the aphorism "Every night needs a special menu" turned into a much more vegetarian maxim: “Every day should be unique”, and the aphorism “Marriage is entirely dependent on the bed” was generally replaced by the question “What is the essence of marriage?”. After the release of this translation, there was again an almost century-long pause, and only after 1995, when our translation was first published by the publishing house "New Literary Review", "Physiology of Marriage" became available to the Russian reader in its entirety.

The Russian history of Minor Troubles is not much richer than that of The Physiology of Marriage. August 26, 1840, in The Northern Bee, under the heading "Little Annoyances of Married Life. Balzac's article, a chapter was published, which later received the title "The Jesuitism of Women" (the translation was made according to the publication in the newspaper "Caricature").

In 1846, under the heading "Philosophy of Married Life in Paris", a translation of those chapters that were included in the first part of the French collection "Le Diable à Paris" was published in the collection "The Devil in Paris".

Also in 1846, the Library for Reading published in volume 74 under the title "Little Misfortunes of Married Life" a translation (in some places reduced to a paraphrase) of those chapters that Balzac had published in the Press newspaper (the translation was carried out swiftly: publication in the Press ” ended on December 7, according to the new style, and the volume of the Russian journal received censorship permission on December 31, 1845, according to the old style).

Finally, in the second half of the 19th century, two separate editions came out: in 1876 in Moscow in the translation of N.A. Putyata and in 1899 in St. Petersburg in the translation of A. Blok’s grandmother E. G. Beketova (the translation was included in volume 20 collected works of Balzac in the edition of Panteleev). Since 1899, Minor Troubles of Married Life have not been published in Russian.

Putyata's translation is known only from bibliographic indexes; in the only library where this book is listed in the catalog (GPB in St. Petersburg), it "has not been in place since 1956", as for the translations of Rantsov and Beketova, they are interesting as a fact of the history of translation, but not easy to read. Beketova translates the phrase: "My dear, don't get so excited" as "My dear, why are you dusting?" grass in the field! Using words that mean nothing now than they did a hundred years ago; some not very successful phrases (such as “love complicated by betrayal of her husband” by Rantsov or “blowing driven inside” by Beketova) and, finally, a kind of “censorship”, which has already been discussed above - all this often makes Balzac the narrator in old translations is funny. Meanwhile, he was ironic and witty, but never funny.

The translation is made according to the edition: CH. Vol. 11 (Physiologie du mariage) and 12 (Petites misères de la vie conjugale), where the text is reproduced in Furn's edition. The footnotes draw on René Guise's commentaries on The Physiology of Marriage and Jean-Louis Tritter on The Minor Annoyances of Married Life. For the present edition, my translation of The Physiology of Marriage, first published in 1995 and reprinted several times since then, has been verified and revised, and the notes have been significantly expanded, including by indicating sources unknown to French commentators.

Vera Milchina

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The following excerpt from the book Petty Annoyances of Married Life (compilation) (Honoré de Balzac, 1846) provided by our book partner -