Books in The Human Comedy series

Louis Lambert, The Exiles, and Seraphita are three titles from the “Philosophical Studies” of Honoré de Balzac’s magnum opus, The Human Comedy, which includes about 100 linked stories and novels. The three works included in this volume are thematically connected by their engagement with the spiritual doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg.Louis Lambert examines the life and theories of a boy genius who is enrolled in the Collège de Vendôme by a benefactor, the real-life author Madame de Staël. But the actual events of Louis Lambert are secondary to its extended discussions of philosophy and human emotion.The Exiles is a short story, published in 1831, about two poets named Dante and Godefroid de Gand who attend the Sorbonne at the start of the fourteenth century. It explores questions of metaphysics and mysticism, particularly the spiritual quest for illuminism and enlightenment.Seraphita is Balzac’s paean to spiritual love. It departs from the realism of the author’s best-known works. Seraphita is a strange and melancholic being loved by Minna, who believes him to be a man, and also by Wilfrid, who considers her a woman. In fact, Seraphita is an androgyne, the perfect example of humanity.

In 1792 the townspeople of Issoudun enjoyed the services of a physician named Rouget, whom they held to be a man of consummate malignity. Were we to believe certain bold tongues, he made his wife extremely unhappy, although she was the most beautiful woman of the neighborhood. Perhaps, indeed, she was rather silly. But the prying of friends, the slander of enemies, and the gossip of acquaintances, had never succeeded in laying bare the interior of that household. Doctor Rouget was a man of whom we say in common parlance, “He is not pleasant to deal with.” Consequently, during his lifetime, his townsmen kept silence about him and treated him civilly. His wife, a demoiselle Descoings, feeble in health during her girlhood (which was said to be a reason why the doctor married her), gave birth to a son, and also to a daughter who arrived, unexpectedly, ten years after her brother, and whose birth took the husband, doctor though he were, by surprise. This late-comer was named Agathe.These little facts are so simple, so commonplace, that a writer seems scarcely justified in placing them in the fore-front of his history; yet if they are not known, a man of Doctor Rouget’s stamp would be thought a monster, an unnatural father, when, in point of fact, he was only following out the evil tendencies which many people shelter under the terrible axiom that “men should have strength of character,”—a masculine phrase that has caused many a woman’s misery. - Taken from "The Black Sheep" written by Honore de Balzac