Not Ball Sack

It is no small coincidence that I recently finished the first book of Honore De Balzac's History of the Thirteen and also happened to cook pizza for thirteen people the other night. A premice that sort of runs throughout the three-in-one book centers on a secret society of thirteen men in Paris. (Here is where I admit my fascination with secret societies because my grandaddy was a Mason and is interred in the Mason section of a cemetery in Tennessee. When my sister and I spent time in Mississippi during our summers, my grandaddy used to take us to his Mason meetings when we were little. The most I could understand is that they were fundraising to build a charity hospital.)

History of Thirteen, cleverly enough, refuses to focus on the secret society, but each one of the thirteen appear from time to time and I have immensely enjoyed counting them. It's like finding the poem among the novel, which centers largely on the double standards that women face with love: men are stallions and women are sluts. Unfortunately in 19th Century Paris, the women usually die because of their passions. Even through the somewhat shoddy translation, the sarcasm is easy to gather. I wonder if Balzac knew Dickens. One of my favorite directors, Jacques Rivette, made a film of The Duchess de Langeais. If you're as crazy about Rivette as I am, you should read Balzac too.

Jonathan Lethem said he planned to read Balzac this summer in Brooklyn. (If you need a good fiction recommendation, just read whatever Lethem says. It's usually always good.) Alas, I have taken my Balzac with me to Mexico and will leave you with two small quotations from The Duchess de Langeais. By the way, The Thirteen seem to be a pretty good bunch. They show up, thirteen carriages, to funerals and they also help one break out a former girlfriend-turned-nun.

"From the day when it was made clear to the most intelligent nation in the world that the restored nobility was organizing power and finance for its own profit, that day it fell mortally ill. It wanted to be an aristocracy when it could be no more than an oligarchy..."

"Who has not, at least once in a lifetime, turned his house and home and papers upside down and impatiently ransacked his memory to think where he has left a precious article, before experiencing the ineffable pleasure of finding it again after wasting several days in vain searches; after suffering the alternations of hope and despair; after fuming over this tremendous triffle to the point of impassioned exasperation? Well now, extend this rabid quest over a period of five years; for the trifle in question subsitute a woman, a woman's heart, a woman's love."