How I’ve missed Balzac
He was one of the very first classics I ever read, back in my (dark 😅) teenage years, before Dostoevsky and Tolstoy entered my life. At the time, I was a teenage immigrant wandering the streets of Europe, and I remember living in this tiny shack that served as a living room, bedroom, and kitchen all at once. There was no place to read in peace, just for my own pleasure, without disturbing the other people in that house (whom I hope I’ll never have to lay eyes on again 😅).
The bathroom library
So, in order to read late into the night and just to have a bit of personal space, I’d slip into the bathroom, sit on the closed toilet lid, and lose myself in my books.
No one knew I was reading (they were the kind of people who saw reading as pointless - “it doesn’t put food on the table”), and they assumed I was doing drugs in there instead. 😅
In that bathroom, for hours on end, right after school or work and often until late at night, I read through the entire La Comédie Humaine. I spent so many Saturday nights in there, while everyone else was out wasting their evenings in the ugly suburban nightclubs - that’s where people were actually getting high, not me, the poor soul in the bathroom in the company of Balzac. 😅
Back then, we had no internet, no smartphones, nothing… just a TV, which the others in that house monopolized by watching Maria de Filippi’s C’è posta per te.
I haven’t read Balzac since. I miss him, but I’m afraid that if I read him again today, I might not enjoy him as much, and that would ruin the impressions I’ve kept all these years - impressions shaped as much by the books themselves as by the memories and the circumstances of reading them.
I do remember, though, that I really loved the novel that follows Lost Illusions, A Harlot High and Low, mainly because it features my favorite Balzac character: Vautrin, who also appears in Père Goriot. In that one, Vautrin is the villain - and I’ve always rooted for the villains. As for Lucien, the main character here, I sometimes downright hated him.
Still, I can say without hesitation that this novel, like Balzac’s others, was something I lived, not just read. I don’t know how much of its magic would survive for me today if I revisited it, but I do know this: Balzac played a role in deepening my love for books - and that love remains the greatest passion I have.
