Paris, La Cité 2025: Digters en denkers

Honoré de Balzac

Parys stimuleer - nie net al die sintuie nie, maar - en veral ook - die denke. Soveel voorbeelde van oorspronklike en wisselende denkstrome en kontroversiële argumente kan na die Franse geskiedenis en kultuur teruggevoer word. En dan word die verwoording daarvan streng onder die loep geneem, of nie? Hoe veg ons tog nie ons kruistogte met die skerp woord in die hand nie?

Ons besoek Maison de Balzac in die Passy-gebied in Parys. Alhoewel die huismuseum nie groot is nie, is dit omvattend in terme van Honoré de Balzac se lewe en oevre. As ‘n interessante en omstrede figuur, haal Balzac dikwels die nuus met betrekking tot sowel sy skrywersloopbaan as sy persoonlike lewe. “He fascinated his contemporaries with his rings, his gold-headed cane, his box at the Opéra. He lives with an insatiable gluttony, an appetite "of money, of women, of glory, of reputation, of titles, of wines, and of fruits”. Hy was besonder toegewyd en ywerig – met ‘n ongekende nougesetheid rondom sy werk. “To keep up with this pace, he has been consuming too much coffee for years, which he drinks "crushed in the Turkish style" in order to stimulate "his manufacture of ideas": "If you take it on an empty stomach, this coffee inflames the walls of the stomach, twists it, mistreats it”.

https://youtu.be/kBRmjADuQcE

Honoré de Balzac - Wikipedia

As he explains in his, foreword to La Comédie humaine his project was to identify the "social species" of his time, just as Buffon had identified zoological species. Having discovered through his readings of Walter Scott that the novel could aspire to a "philosophical value", he wanted to explore the different social classes and the individuals who make them up in order to "write the history forgotten by so many historians, that of morals" and to "compete with the civil registry".

He has a high opinion of the role of the writer and considers his task as a priesthood: "Today the writer has replaced the priest, he has put on the chlamys of the martyrs, he suffers a thousand evils, he takes the light from the altar and spreads it among the peoples. He is a prince, he is a beggar. He consoles, he curses, he prophesies. His voice does not only travel through the nave of a cathedral, it can sometimes thunder from one end of the world to the other".