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The Quest of the Absolute

“La Recherche de l’Absolu” was published in 1834, with a touching dedication to Madame Josephine Delannoy:  “Madame, may it please God that this, my book, may live when I am dead, that the gratitude which is due from me to you, and which equals, I trust, your motherlike generosity to me, may hope to endure beyond the limits set to human love.”  The novel became a part of the “Human Comedy” in 1845.  The struggle of Balthazar Claes in his quest for the Absolute, his disregard of all else save his work, and the heroic devotion of Josephine and Marguerite, are characteristic features of Balzac’s art; the sordidness of life and the mad passion for the unattainable are admirably relieved, as in “Eugenie Grandet” and “Old Goriot,” by a certain nobility and purity of motive.  The novel is generally acknowledged one of Balzac’s masterpieces, both in vigour of portraiture and minuteness of detail.  Perhaps no one was ever better fitted to depict the ruin wrought by a fixed idea than Balzac himself, who wasted much of his laborious life in struggling to discover a short cut to wealth.

I.—­Claes, the Alchemist

In Douai, situated in the Rue de Paris, there is a house which stands out from all the rest in the city by reason of its purely Flemish character.  In all its details, this tall and handsome house expresses the manners of the domesticated people of the Low Countries.  The name of the house for some two centuries has been Maison Claes, after the great family of craftsmen who occupied it.  These Van Claes had amassed fortunes, played a part in politics, and had suffered many vicissitudes in the course of history without losing their place in the mighty bourgeois world of commerce.  They were substantial people, princes of trade.

At the end of the eighteenth century the representative of this ancient and affluent family was Balthazar Claes, a tall and handsome young man, who after some years’ residence in Paris, where he saw the fashionable world and made acquaintance with many of the great savants, including Lavoisier the chemist, returned to his home in Douai, and set himself to find a wife.

It was on a visit to a relation in Ghent that he heard gossip concerning a young lady living in Brussels, which made him curious to see so interesting a person.  Rumour had two tales to tell of this Mlle. Josephine Temninck.  She was beautiful, but she was deformed.  Could deformity be triumphed over by beauty of face?  A relative of Claes thought that it could, and maintained this opinion against the opposite camp.  This relative spoke of Mlle. Temninck’s character, telling how the sweet girl had surrendered her share of the family estate that her younger brother might make a great marriage, and how she had quite resigned herself, even on the threshold of her life, to the idea of spinsterhood and narrow means.