Treatise on Elegant Living. Honore de Balzac

elegant dress, and stoic distinction could eventually be followed by members of any class and occupation—provided, of course, they had access to a sufficient amount of funds to maintain a life of leisure.

      But Brummell was more than an infiltrator of ranks; he was a new kind of individual. If it was his nature to live beyond his means (insolvency was the inevitable outcome for Brummell and his followers), it was his legacy to live beyond society’s understanding. Whereas the snob (a different character altogether, albeit one understandably confused with the Regency dandies) maneuvered within society by laws and manners established by that society, the dandy operated in accordance with laws of his own making, and for an audience that consisted of himself before anyone. The practice of elegance and taste was one that either passed unnoticed by anyone save the initiate, or one that shocked the populace; it could find an outlet in the reactionary politics of the secret society, or the more striking and rebellious form of modernist shock: the dandies were the first to employ the now normalized practice of shocking the bourgeoisie.

      It took the French, however, to recognize and elaborate upon these still budding qualities of the dandy, and formulate an intellectual brand of aesthetic and social egoism that would inform modernism and would find its culmination in the figure of Charles Baudelaire. It would be in France that the dandy and the bohemian would become two sides of the same coin, the dandy simply having money, the bohemian doing without (it was even quite natural to start a dandy, as Baudelaire did, and finish a bohemian). And it is in France that the second, and most interesting, stage of dandyism took place.

      There were three broad phases of dandyism: the social dandyism of Beau Brummell and the early nineteenth-century Regency; the French intellectual dandyism of the mid-century; and what has become the more widely known commercial dandyism (what Ellen Moers referred to as “hedonistic dandyism”) of Oscar Wilde and the finde-siècle, a basically British chapter that in a roundabout way took its cue from the French rather than the British Regency. It was a somewhat muddled cue, though, blending dandyism with the decadent movement that had since taken shape, resulting in the amalgamated “aesthete” who bore but faint resemblance to the original puritanical mold of Brummell.

      The French themselves took a muddled cue from the Regency dandy, though, partly owing to a strong early nineteenth-century Anglomania in France that, as Moers put it, “made the dandy and the romantic one and the same, though the two had scarcely met at home.”¹ The combination would prove to be productive, however, and it helped turn the French dandy into a crucial transitional figure between the late eighteenth-century libertine and the late nineteenth-century decadent.² Moers described the dandy as being the “epitome of selfish irresponsibility … ideally free of all human commitments that conflict with taste: passions, moralities, ambitions, politics or occupations.”³ By exchanging the words “taste” and “passions” over the colon dividing them in this definition, though, one could essentially change this definition of the dandy to that of the libertine who preceded him.

      This simple exchange of taste for passion, though, made for a world of pointed contrast between the two autocrats: if the libertine embraced his nature and pursued sexual pleasure by mastering others, the dandy denied his nature, mastered himself, and displayed what Barbey d’Aurevilly described as an “antique calm” and an “undecidedly intellectual sex.” If marriage and reproduction were both anathema to libertine and dandy, their reasons were opposite: for the libertine, they interfered with his private pleasures, while for the dandy, they interfered with his social persona. Whereas the libertine took an Enlightenment zest in vulgarity and blasphemy in the boudoir, the dandy, as impertinent as he may have been in the salon, could never be accused of vulgarity. If the libertine parleyed with invective and violence behind closed doors, the dandy’s weapon of choice was his social use of wit; if the libertine indulged in cruelty by stabbing his victims with pins and daggers, the dandy’s finest stabs were always the cut of his suit and the cutting remarks he reserved for friends and enemies alike. If the libertine removed his societal mask within the boudoir in order to drink in a victim’s blood, the dandy did the opposite:

      “These Stoics of the boudoir drink their own blood under their mask and remain masked.”⁴

      As Barbey d’Aurevilly concluded: “Passion is too true to be dandyesque.” But this opposition of nature and artifice actually points to the essential, common feature between Sade’s libertine and the dandy: their shared opposition to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Romantic belief in the noble savage, the belief that man is essentially good when in a state of nature. Both libertine and dandy considered cruelty to be most natural, virtue an artificial construct, and egoism the only law worth obeying. But the dandy differed from the libertine in that he did not embrace this conception of the natural state, and instead chose to celebrate the excesses of artifice. When Baudelaire (in many ways Sade’s truest disciple) posited virtue and beauty as artificial constructs, his adoption of the dandy’s role and embracement of artifice ultimately turned him into something of a dark moralist.

      It is also on this point that the French dandy signaled a significant break from both Romantic and libertine, both of whom, despite their opposing outlooks on nature, ultimately aimed at an absorption into nature, a loss of the self via the frenzied throes of natural or sexual carnage. This quest for self-dissipation would find its echo in the decadent, whose apposite, almost Romantic, withdrawal into artifice turned him into not just an antihero, but even a nonhero. The dandy, on the other hand, though he shunned nature, only used artifice and remained utterly dependant on society. Without an observer, he was like the sound made by George Berkeley’s tree falling unobserved in a wood: he would in effect cease to exist. As long as he had an audience, the dandy relinquished his self-identity to no one: self-control, dignity, and pride yielded nothing to emotion; paradox battled against any manner of conformity; and death itself, far from holding any dark attraction, was merely something that happened to other people. Nature has no heroes, and artifice consumes them; it was the middle ground of dandyism that made it, as Baudelaire put it, “the last spark of heroism amid decadence.”⁵

      This new heroic formulation of the dandy would be established by three essential and defining texts of French dandyism, all composed by exceptional men who were themselves significant and very personalized embodiments of dandyism: Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1845 On Dandyism and George Brummell, Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 cornerstone to modernism The Painter of Modern Life, and the treatise that helped pave the way for both them, Honoré de Balzac’s 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living.

      Balzac’s Treatise stands at the threshold of French dandyism, marking a historical and theoretical shift that would either influence or herald the dandyism to come.⁶ Although intellectual dandyism is often considered to stem from Barbey d’Aurevilly’s classic work on Brummell, Balzac was the first to open the door. He wrote his treatise only a few months after George IV’s death, a death that officially signaled the end of Regency exclusivism, and thereby the end of Regency dandyism. It is significant that this end was directly followed by the beginnings of French dandyism, whose groundwork Balzac was helping to establish.

      Even those familiar with Balzac’s novels, however, may be initially taken off guard by the notion of that giant presenting himself as an expert on elegance—let alone a self-proclaimed originator of, to use his own coinage, the new science of “elegantology.” Even more surprising may be the fact that Balzac considered himself something of a practitioner of the science. He was an odd manifestation of early French dandyism: taking his cues in dress from friends such as Eugène Sue and Lautour-Mézeray (both of whom make appearances in this treatise), Balzac proved to be more of a part-time dandy. The dandy memorialist Captain Gronow provided a particularly amusing assessment of the man’s elegance in practice: “The great enchanter was one of the oiliest and commonest looking mortals I ever beheld; being short and corpulent, with a broad florid face, a cascade of double chins, and straight greasy hair … [he] dressed in the worst possible taste, wore sparkling jewels on a dirty shirt front, and diamond rings on unwashed fingers….”⁷

      Balzac did not, obviously, quite match up to the exacting standards he established in his treatise, and in the end, he himself probably did not see himself in the category. But he introduced a new category into the