honoré de balzac the unknown masterpiece

Throughout the tale artistic creativity is intimately bound up with questions of sexuality in general and of sexual dominance in particular. He crosses the threshold 'after to-ing and fro-ing … with the lack of resolve of a lover not daring to enter the presence of his first mistress.' Poussin's entrance is effectively a sexual initiation. He visits uninvited the studio of the well-established François Pourbus. Gillette is the beautiful mistress and model-with one theme being the ultimate irreconcilability of the two roles-of the young Nicholas Poussin, an impoverished artist newly arrived in Paris. But in the 1847 publication the entire work was retitled 'Gillette.' In narrative terms, although Gillette's role is a relatively slight one, she can be seen as a focus for many of the story's themes. The first change counterpoints Gillette, the model and mistress of another painter, against Catherine Lescault.

We are initially invited to see the two points of focus as Frenhofer and Catherine Lescault, painter and subject and perhaps painter and mistress. The textual history gives rise to many problems that need not concern us here, but the changes in the title are significant. In the edition published in 1847, Le Provincial à Paris, he made further differences, including a change in the title the story was now called 'Gillette.' It is as 'Gillette, or the Unknown Masterpiece' that Anthony Rudolf's excellent modern translation was published. The first section was now headed 'Gillette.' For an edition of his Études philosophiques, published in 1837, Balzac made extensive additions, mainly involving Frenhofer's ideas on art. Its two sections were headed 'Maître Frenhofer' and 'Catherine Lescault.' Expanded and amended, it appeared in the same year in volume 3 of Balzac's Romans et contes philosophiques. 'The Unknown Masterpiece' was first published in the periodical L'Artiste in 1831. It is a masterpiece of compression that invites critical expansion, as it were, in a great many different idioms and directions. In 'The Unknown Masterpiece,' however, we are challenged and delighted not by a work of immense scale but by a novella both stringent in design and resonant of meaning. Given the sprawling abundance of La Comédie humaine, one does not immediately think of Honoré de Balzac as a master of concentration.

Honoré de balzac the unknown masterpiece