Reading Order
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes Reading Order
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838–1847) by Honoré de Balzac is the thriller of the Comédie humaine — a four-part novel in which Vautrin (the escaped convict from Le Père Goriot and Illusions perdues) orchestrates Lucien de Rubempré's ascent to the top of Parisian society by providing him with the money of Esther van Gobseck, a prostitute who loves Lucien. The novel is simultaneously a society comedy (the great world of balls and salons that Lucien must penetrate), a love story (Esther and Lucien), a political intrigue (the secret police, the Royalist plot), and a criminal thriller (Vautrin's operations, the police investigation, the prison). It ends catastrophically: Lucien's society career is revealed as a fraud, he is arrested, and he hangs himself in prison; Vautrin, confronted with the failure of his project, offers his services to the police as head of criminal intelligence (a post the historical Vidocq actually held). The transformation of Vautrin from criminal philosopher to chief of police is one of the most startling endings in French fiction and the finest example of Balzac's systematic irony: the criminal is the most effective policeman because crime and policing are different faces of the same social order.
Where to start
Illusions perdues (Part III — Ève et David)
Complete Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes Book List
- 1Buy
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
Honoré de Balzac·1847·Read after Le Père Goriot and Illusions perdues; the four parts (Comment aiment les filles; À combien l'amour revient aux vieillards; Où mènent les mauvais chemins; La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin) are best read in sequence - 2Buy
Illusions perdues
Honoré de Balzac·1843·The essential predecessor: Lucien's first failure and Vautrin's first appearance as the Spanish abbé who saves him from suicide; without Illusions perdues, Splendeurs opens in medias res - 3Buy
Le Père Goriot
Honoré de Balzac·1835·The original Vautrin: the criminal philosopher in his first incarnation at the boarding house, before the three-novel arc that will end with his becoming chief of police - 4Buy
Les Misérables
Victor Hugo·1862·The Hugo parallel: Javert as the policeman who cannot accommodate mercy is the anti-Vautrin — the man of law who cannot become a criminal, versus the criminal who becomes the law; both are studies in the identity of policing and crime - 5Buy
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Charles Dickens·1870·The English unfinished parallel: Dickens's last novel of crime and social respectability shares Balzac's interest in the criminal who passes for respectable; left unfinished at Dickens's death
Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes — Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to read Le Père Goriot and Illusions perdues first?
Yes — Splendeurs et misères is the third act of a three-novel story about Lucien de Rubempré and Vautrin. Without Le Père Goriot you will not understand who Vautrin is or why his criminal philosophy is so seductive. Without Illusions perdues you will not understand why Lucien is in Vautrin's power. Splendeurs can be read alone as a thriller, but the emotional stakes depend on the preceding novels.
Who is Esther van Gobseck?
The granddaughter of the usurer Gobseck from Balzac's earlier novella, Esther is a prostitute who has been genuinely converted and who loves Lucien with total devotion. She is used by Vautrin as the financial instrument of Lucien's social ambition — he forces her back into prostitution to extract money from the Baron de Nucingen — and her death is the emotional center of the novel.
Why does Vautrin become chief of police at the end?
Balzac's systematic irony: the criminal philosopher who has spent three novels demonstrating that crime and social order are two faces of the same system resolves his career by taking the institutional form of that insight. The police, for Balzac, are not the opponents of crime but its bureaucratic version; Vautrin simply changes his formal designation. The ending is comic and horrifying simultaneously.
Is Splendeurs et misères a detective novel?
Partly — the fourth part (La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin) involves a sustained police investigation, and the novel contains many of the elements of the detective novel (concealed identities, surveillance, confession, the skilled detective). But the genre is social novel with crime scenes, not detective fiction with social background. Balzac invented several conventions that would become detective fiction without intending to write the genre.
What is the relationship between Vautrin and Lucien?
One of the most complex relationships in 19th-century fiction — simultaneously the relationship of a Mephistopheles to his Faust, of a father to his chosen son, and of a man who loves Lucien beyond what friendship requires but within what the novel's conventions permit. Balzac leaves the exact nature of Vautrin's devotion deliberately ambiguous; the excess of that devotion is the engine of the plot.
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