OMG do you just love the parts of Proust where he finally meets Mme de Villeparisis and Bergotte--these authors he has loved--and realizes they are NOT AT ALL COOL! That they are writing about cool stuff from such a distance, such a remove, and that there mere fact that they are ambitious writers sort of disqualifies them from ever truly being a part of fashionable society. Admittedly, Proust's novel is in part about the change in social mores that allows, say, an insufferable bourgeois Mme. de Verdurin to start running a fashionable salon in 1920--an idea that would've been unthinkable in 1890.
I think people can successfully write about being cool if, like Proust, they've retreated from society and are in no way any longer attempting to be cool themselves =]
I keep thinking about his assertion that we have no written account of a truly elegant salon, because no elegant hostess would ever write such a diary. That any first-person accounts of being a salon hostess will come, by definition, from second-rate hostesses.
Very cool piece, I really enjoyed it! You could see the grandparents of a lot of modern ideas about style and elegance and money in this one. I especially enjoyed that the idea of stealth wealth was still present even back then. I think elegance might be out of the running for me by these definitions, because I’d rather have the hand-me-downs than have to keep updating perfectly good things to stay relevant/elegant.
Much like Ken, this felt a tad satirical to me. Almost like a 19th-century Preppy Handbook. Is that just a misreading of the tone do you think?
I do think it's tongue-and-cheek, and there's certainly a satirical element — Balzac himself wasn't a very elegant or well-dressed person. But I do think he means a lot of it, in that he's observing a social phenomenon and trying to set down precisely what it is and what it means. His novels are full of careful attention to clothing and manners and very specific about what those details mean about someone's social standing. The scene from Lost Illusions where Julien first arrives in Paris, observes all the elegant men, and realizes that his clothes are all wrong — and then tries to buy new clothes and fucks it up even more — we laugh at Julien, and we know that ultimately these things are silly, but at the same time, his clothes are Very Important and have major plot consequences.
I feel like a factor in effortlessness is habit. (I guess that’s the definition of “second nature.”) A group of old farmers sitting at the donut shop, shooting the shit about grain prices, the high school football team this year, and the governor, has a kind of ineffable, leisured, unmanufactured quality to it. And it really has only one ingredient: repetition. You wear a pair of funky shoes one day and you feel self-conscious and everybody reacts. You wear them a hundred days and you’re just “funky shoe girl.”
Yes, he has a passage about how to truly wear clothes elegantly you have to be completely comfortable in them, which comes from wearing them frequently and habitually.
Did I miss something? Was Balzac being slightly tongue-in-cheek? I can't imagine him fully embracing consumerism and the 19th century analogue of "cool", right down to omitting the idea that it's inelegant to talk about elegance, except in engineering, where you can do the math.
Similar to my reply to Alexandra above, I do think he's being tongue-and-cheek and a bit satirical. But Balzac was also a very close observer of clothes and manners and what they reveal about people, and his novels are full of it. The treatise also contains some political philosophy essentially pointing out how absurd — and how inevitable, to him — these hierarchies are. He's taking a light satirical tone, but he's also trying to describe something real.
Thinking more about Balzac, it came to mind that Piketty used Balzac's descriptions of fortunes, wages, and costs in his tome, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", making Balzac that rare type who both pokes fun and exquisitely documents. Piketty also uses contemporary Austin's numbers, as hers were also factual. Good company to keep!
I’m so delighted by this post!! I (very recently) read my first Balzac book and enjoyed it immensely. And I prize ELEGANCE above all things, which has occasionally produced enormous inconveniences in my life (like refusing to buy anything inelegant, and therefore going without many functional but ugly objects)…but I remain committed to this lifestyle, and I feel now that reading Balzac would help!
It’s too bad he only wrote part of the treatise (there’s an outline with a bunch of sections that ultimately aren’t included). It’s such a fun read. Glad you enjoyed!
OMG do you just love the parts of Proust where he finally meets Mme de Villeparisis and Bergotte--these authors he has loved--and realizes they are NOT AT ALL COOL! That they are writing about cool stuff from such a distance, such a remove, and that there mere fact that they are ambitious writers sort of disqualifies them from ever truly being a part of fashionable society. Admittedly, Proust's novel is in part about the change in social mores that allows, say, an insufferable bourgeois Mme. de Verdurin to start running a fashionable salon in 1920--an idea that would've been unthinkable in 1890.
I think people can successfully write about being cool if, like Proust, they've retreated from society and are in no way any longer attempting to be cool themselves =]
I keep thinking about his assertion that we have no written account of a truly elegant salon, because no elegant hostess would ever write such a diary. That any first-person accounts of being a salon hostess will come, by definition, from second-rate hostesses.
You can either take in the scene, or you can take the picture.
Very cool piece, I really enjoyed it! You could see the grandparents of a lot of modern ideas about style and elegance and money in this one. I especially enjoyed that the idea of stealth wealth was still present even back then. I think elegance might be out of the running for me by these definitions, because I’d rather have the hand-me-downs than have to keep updating perfectly good things to stay relevant/elegant.
Much like Ken, this felt a tad satirical to me. Almost like a 19th-century Preppy Handbook. Is that just a misreading of the tone do you think?
I do think it's tongue-and-cheek, and there's certainly a satirical element — Balzac himself wasn't a very elegant or well-dressed person. But I do think he means a lot of it, in that he's observing a social phenomenon and trying to set down precisely what it is and what it means. His novels are full of careful attention to clothing and manners and very specific about what those details mean about someone's social standing. The scene from Lost Illusions where Julien first arrives in Paris, observes all the elegant men, and realizes that his clothes are all wrong — and then tries to buy new clothes and fucks it up even more — we laugh at Julien, and we know that ultimately these things are silly, but at the same time, his clothes are Very Important and have major plot consequences.
I feel like a factor in effortlessness is habit. (I guess that’s the definition of “second nature.”) A group of old farmers sitting at the donut shop, shooting the shit about grain prices, the high school football team this year, and the governor, has a kind of ineffable, leisured, unmanufactured quality to it. And it really has only one ingredient: repetition. You wear a pair of funky shoes one day and you feel self-conscious and everybody reacts. You wear them a hundred days and you’re just “funky shoe girl.”
Yes, he has a passage about how to truly wear clothes elegantly you have to be completely comfortable in them, which comes from wearing them frequently and habitually.
Ah, yes. Brilliant. I need to read this book.
Did I miss something? Was Balzac being slightly tongue-in-cheek? I can't imagine him fully embracing consumerism and the 19th century analogue of "cool", right down to omitting the idea that it's inelegant to talk about elegance, except in engineering, where you can do the math.
Similar to my reply to Alexandra above, I do think he's being tongue-and-cheek and a bit satirical. But Balzac was also a very close observer of clothes and manners and what they reveal about people, and his novels are full of it. The treatise also contains some political philosophy essentially pointing out how absurd — and how inevitable, to him — these hierarchies are. He's taking a light satirical tone, but he's also trying to describe something real.
Thinking more about Balzac, it came to mind that Piketty used Balzac's descriptions of fortunes, wages, and costs in his tome, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", making Balzac that rare type who both pokes fun and exquisitely documents. Piketty also uses contemporary Austin's numbers, as hers were also factual. Good company to keep!
I’m so delighted by this post!! I (very recently) read my first Balzac book and enjoyed it immensely. And I prize ELEGANCE above all things, which has occasionally produced enormous inconveniences in my life (like refusing to buy anything inelegant, and therefore going without many functional but ugly objects)…but I remain committed to this lifestyle, and I feel now that reading Balzac would help!
It’s too bad he only wrote part of the treatise (there’s an outline with a bunch of sections that ultimately aren’t included). It’s such a fun read. Glad you enjoyed!