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This chapter studies Balzac's Louis Lambert (1832), in which the character of Lambert is a (possibly) mentally ill genius who retreats into a world to which only his erstwhile fiancée has access. Through his writings Balzac attempts to examine and portray a certain topic on the matter of geniuses: the essential role played by women in their survival. Louis Lambert ends with the destruction of the main character, a male genius who nonetheless exemplifies all Balzac's own ideas about genius, and is also its most complete and elaborate theorist. Once again, fiction's interest in its failure may reveal more about genius than success. And that failure is also accompanied—still with considerable ambiguity—by the female presence that Balzac argued also deserved recognition as the essential helpmeet of genius.

This chapter examines Beckett's allusions to The Tempest, shedding light on his views on the idea of sympathy. Opposing Nussbaum's perception of Beckett's writing as a ‘critique of emotion’, Chapter 4 demonstrates that Beckett critiques the ways in which emotional formulae can be constructed by works of fiction. Tracing echoes of Browning's ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ in Beckett's How It Is, this chapter goes on to demonstrate that Beckett's allusions to Shakespeare and Browning are a parodic critique of object-centred ideas of reading, thus extending our sense of the ethical aspects of his work.

To move from the retrospective and nostalgic view of the Restoration that is Balzac's to the world leading to the Second World War that is Sartre's is to cover a bit over a century of tumultuous change, industrial and economic revolution, and social evolution in mores, class structure, and demographics to an extent that the West had never before seen. While verisimilitude remains the anchor of all of these works, analyses of each of them show disruptions strengthen and deepen the narrative. Though all of these authors transform evolutions, still there are no authors the same.

This chapter begins by looking at the social mistake in relation both to the novel and to the rather sudden appearance of the etiquette book in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. While there had long been other works on manners—courtesy manuals, conduct books, etc.—the etiquette book differed from what came before because it made its case for of good form without offering the reader a stable ethical ideal. In the absence of shared social or cultural ends, the mistake emerges as an object that is at once reliable and disturbing. Then, in the context readings of eating peas with your knife in Thackeray and pointing at people in Balzac, the chapter develops a psychoanalytically inflected theory of the social mistake both in general and in relation to the particular form of the nineteenth-century novel.

Beginning with an overview of the Western sympathetic revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, this chapter lays out a series of instances in which China makes its appearance inside moral philosophy, focusing mostly on works by Adam Smith and Honoré de Balzac. It introduces the book's two major theoretical keywords, the “ecliptic” and the “example-effect,” and considers them in relation to the history of moral philosophy and the “Asian values debate” on human rights.

This chapter shows how the period between 1835 and the beginning of 1838 lays the foundations of long and major works: the first parts of Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes; Le Secret des Ruggieri (F: La Confidence des Ruggieri), which became the central section of Sur Catherine de Médicis; Le Lys dans la vallée and La Vieille Fille. And it sees the demise of the Contes drolatiques, with the publication of the third and last completed dixain in December 1837 — which the passage just quoted reduces to an immense graffito, scarcely a year after they themselves were the monument ( LH i. 49). The first stories of this period, Melmoth réconcilié and La Fille aux yeux d'or, both published in 1835, are unfinished business from the folie du conte; whilst in 1836, Balzac's purchase of, and considerable contribution to, the Chronique de Paris create what look like gap-fillers, a series of brief ‘monographies’ which flesh out recurring or secondary characters: La Messe de l'athée, Facino Cane, L'Interdiction. Only La Confidence des Ruggieri (1836) and Gambara (1837) return to the more substantive and philosophical concerns which, from Balzac's earliest career, lay at the heart of his stories.

This chapter shows that between 1838 and 1841, Balzac published nine brief but no less central stories of La Com é die humaine. Virtually all these texts were first conceived, and, in the case of La Torpille, first published, as short fiction. This, the nucleus of what is now part one of Splendeurs et misères, was originally briefer than La Maison Nucingen, as were, in their initial conception or realization, many of Balzac’s longest novels. And virtually all spring from a common source in the early 1830s, at the height of Balzac’s story-writing career, reformulating for the present common themes of creation, invention, and commerce.

This chapter shows that Balzac's reputation as a novelist was cemented by works such as Béatrix, Un grand homme de province à Paris, Le Curé de Village in 1839; Pierrette in 1940. Yet, by 1839, publishing was once again in crisis, and as important as these novels, and more numerous, is a counterpoint of shorter fictions — not only the six stories included in La Comédie humaine, but also series of articles (Petites Misères de la vie conjugale, 1839–40, and those given to the collective publication Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, 1839–40), as well as his 1840 contributions to his second ill-fated venture into newspaper ownership, the Revue parisienne, together with other brief publications. Alongside came frequent but generally unsuccessful forays into theatre: L'École des ménages, refused by the Comédie française in 1839, and Vautrin, more successful but immediately censored. If his output had a common genetic source, its generic outcomes were more diverse: the cause was coherent, its effects ever more fragmented. Without shorter works, the central aesthetic of Balzac's opus would have been inoperable — as is suggested by his determinant theoretical statement in this period, the preface to Une fille d' Eve.

This chapter shows that Balzac’s shorter fictions in the period 1838–1841 embody manifold tensions: between the individual and the type, the centrifugal and the centripetal, between the cohesion and self-containedness of single narratives, and that of the creation as a whole. Such dichotomies, fostered by the modes of production and publication of Balzac’s creation post-1840, answer those between univocal morality, and plurivocal relativism brought by narrative fragmentation and prolongation in serialized works, and by the use of recurring characters. The year 1842 was to see the inauguration of La Comédie humaine: within its overarching and ostensibly single and unifying structure, these conflicting yet complementary characteristics were to be laid out. The mosaic was to become a monument. Or rather, a monumental mosaic.

This chapter argues that Hetzel is symptomatic of the determinant impact of commerce on genre in the remainder of Balzac's career. Between 1842 and his death in 1850 the author wrote only two completely new stories, Honorine and Un homme d'affaires; the remainder rework and re-present earlier narratives, form pen-portraits for Hetzel's other major collective series, Le Diable à Paris (1844–45). Many would themselves be reincorporated both in short fictions so disjointed that they can scarcely be called stories, and in novels as long as Splendeurs et misères. If Balzac's short fiction found a haven in collective livres illustrés such as Hetzel's Animaux or Le Diable, the success of mega-feuilletons like Mathilde or Les Mystères de Paris made novel serializations over many months by big-name authors unrivalled in ensuring newspaper subscribers' brand loyalty. A ‘Nouvelle courte’, Balzac wrote in 1843, was ‘de l'argent perdu’. Yet in his work there is a certain genre blindness, the same fragments reappearing, sometimes in several places — a realization of the nightmare vision of copying in Pierre Grassou. His shorter fictions had become a matter of framing and reframing — developments acknowledged in the Avant-propos to La Comédie humaine.