Library memories, Balzac

Discussing libraries with a friend, one thing she mentioned was that she never really used her University's library. People went there to study, but did not really use the collection there.

While that probably changes based on your major, this was largely true of the Knight Library at University of Oregon too, but I personally had three exceptions.

One happened during that horrible summer where I tried staying in town despite not being enrolled in classes. Just needing to get away I went to the library and got lost in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I didn't end up finishing the book until years later, but that memory stayed with me. It was kind of an oasis in a really bad time.

Another exception was for my seminar. Every history major had to complete a seminar class. There were weekly reading assignments that would be discussed in class, plus a twenty page research paper. The reading assignments were often articles from various historical journals, and each class member trying to track them down individually would have been impractical, so Professor Taylor had a shelf set up with what we needed, and that worked. Even if you ran into one of your fellow students, there were usually four or five articles, so it was workable. That term I was in the library every week.

If the first use was essentially pleasure, and the second was totally coursework, the third one was somewhere in between. I took a French Literature class on Balzac and Stendhal. My memory says I bought the required books of course, but I just did not understand one of them, Balzac's Une Affaire Ténébreuse, but part of me wonders if I tried saving money by not purchasing the books and just checking them out. What I know for sure is that I tried reading it in Spanish. (They did not have it in English.)

Technically my French is probably better than my Spanish, but I was kind of desperate. Eventually I realized that was how the book was supposed to be. There is a plot, and subterfuge, and the whole affair is murky, which is basically what the title tells you is going to happen.

I struggled with that one. One thing that had really stuck out to me though is that there were two female characters who seemed remarkably similar to Louise de Rénal and Mathilde de la Môle (from Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir), in both physical description and personality type, and then in their respective fates.

I went on about this in the final comparison essay, trying to reach five pages, even though the professor said it did not really need to be five pages after requesting a five page paper. That made about an extra page of rambling that she felt was pointless.

Reading that I though but there was a point, because really it was like both authors were showing a previous and a current model of French womanhood, and while both would suffer greatly only the newer one was strong enough to survive it, and if you have that coming from two different authors, that would seem to reflect something, which would have made a lot of sense to try and articulate in the essay, but the idea had still been forming there. I knew there was a connection, I was still getting it.

Anyway, if discovering Un Asunto Tenebroso was not particularly helpful, there was quite a bit of other Balzac there, in various languages, and his range was surprising. I did not read everything available, and I don't know that I really like Balzac enough to try and read all of La Comédie Humaine. After reading through The Girl with the Golden Eyes, I at least get why they sneer "Balzac" that way in The Music Man.  

(It's not every day that you go to murder your lover only to find her already murdered by her other lover whom you instantly recognize as your half sister.)