ABSTRACT
La Rabouilleuse is at once an artist story and an ambitious social canvas. Political events in France, as they affect one family between 1792 and 1839, provide a precise historical context for the familiar components of a Balzacian inheritance struggle: celibacy, marriage, widowhood, adultery, illegitimacy and prostitution. The novel's publication as Un ménage de garçon en province (1843), and its inclusion in the series Les Célibataires, pointed readers in this general direction. 1 At first sight, the story of Joseph Bridau's early career as a painter, and the manner and content of his art, may seem incidentally related to this wider subject matter: creators and creations do not saturate the plot as they do in some of the shorter artist stories explored so far. However, by introducing onto the Furne corrigé the title by which the novel is now conventionally known, 2 Balzac established a fertile connection between 'la Rabouilleuse' as female victim of a homosocial society, and realist representation as mode. Painting metaphors are never far away in Balzac's realist texts, and in this case they are strikingly attached to Flore Brazier, the eponymous Rabouilleuse, so called in Issoudun with ironic reference to her occupation — the child is muddying a stream for her uncle who is fishing for crayfish — when she is chanced upon by the seventy-year-old Rouget: 'Le soir, dans tout Issoudun, il ne fut question que de l'établissement d'une petite Rabouilleuse chez le docteur Rouget. Ce surnom resta dans un pays de moquerie à Mlle Brazier, avant, pendant et après sa fortune.' (iv, 390) For all that gossip circulates so rapidly in Issoudun, only the omniscient narrator has knowledge of the detail of this encounter, and it is his painterly description that first establishes the peasant child as the metaphorical model of a work of art. By calling his novel La Rabouilleuse, a title that espouses the local viewpoint, but is perhaps also suggestive of a statue or painting, Balzac gives wider significance to Joseph's status as a painter than might otherwise have been the case. Indeed, the familiar conjunction of artist and model — here Joseph Bridau and Flore Brazier — cuts across the seemingly disparate strands of this novel. Over twenty years later, the unworldly Joseph, newly arrived in Issoudun to rescue his uncle Jean-Jacques — and the Rouget fortune — from the clutches of the adult Flore, will be overcome by admiration for her physical beauty. His aesthetic enthusiasm, enhanced by the sight of his uncle's paintings, and by anticipated pleasure in their possession, leads him to commit what from the point of view of the inheritance is a tactical blunder, but from that of the novel as a whole is a highly charged act: he parades joyfully through the streets of Issoudun with the Rabouilleuse on his arm. That Flore, sold by her uncle to Joseph's grandfather for the equivalent of six acres of vineyard, should end up, first as Joseph's aunt-by-marriage, then as his sister-in-law, underscores the extent to which the artist-model relation intersects, in this as in Balzac's other artist stories, with the conjugal structures depicted in La Comédie humaine.
