The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

THE HUMAN COMEDY OF BALZAC overflows with fabulous persons, all of them fiercely energetic and many of them daemonic, guided by a highly individual genius. I am not fully immersed in the maelstrom of Balzac, since I have read only twelve of the full-length novels and a handful of the stories. I am not therefore in a position to judge who in this storm of genius stands on an eminence far above the others. Still, I am obsessed by Vautrin, the master of the criminal world who at last changes into the head of the Paris police. His real name is Jacques Collin, and he also appears as Abbé Carlos Herrera, a supposed Spanish cleric. To the underworld and to the authorities, he is known as Dodge-Death, called the Dab by his underlings.

Vautrin is physically powerful and intellectually overwhelming. He wars against society not so much in the name of the insulted and injured, as Victor Hugo's heroic young men fight in Les Misérables, as in his own various names, particularly in that of Dodge-Death. In a subtle way he battles the overt heterosexual basis of nineteenth-century French society. Balzac makes clear that Vautrin is homoerotic and scorns all womankind. To that degree he is scarcely a surrogate for Balzac, who may have had repressed desires, but was a fierce womanizer even after he fell in love with and eventually married Ewelina Hańska, a Polish noblewoman, who survived him by almost a third of a century and took many lovers.