Facino Cane

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Facino Cane is a short story by the French writer Honoré de Balzac , which he wrote in Paris in March 1836. It was published in 1837 by Delloye et Lecou as Volume XII of the series Scènes de la vie parisienne of La Comédie humaine . In the series Études philosophiques (1843) the work was published under the title le Père Canet , then it appeared in 1844 in Scènes de la vie parisienne of la Comédie humaine next to la Messe de l'athée and de Sarrasine in Volume X of the Furne edition , where Balzac used the original title.

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The figure of the twenty-year-old narrator, who lives in poverty in the Parisian Marais district near the Place de la Bastille in an attic room, describes the atmosphere of the Faubourgs , which he crosses on his nightly forays. One day he is invited by his attendant to one of her sisters' wedding, which is being held at a wine merchant on Rue de Charenton. The group of musicians consists of three blind people who had been taken from the institution for the blind; underneath is an old clarinetist who immediately captivates the narrator. It is the 83-year-old Italian Facino Cane who then tells him his life story and asks him to travel to Venice with him .

Canal Saint-Martin. Oil painting by Alfred Sisley 1870

Called “the old Canet” in Paris, he was actually the Venetian patrician Marco Facino Cane, Prince of Varese. When asked how he lost his fortune, Cane takes him outside. They sit down on the edge of the Canal Saint-Martin and Cane begins his story: in 1760 he had a love affair with the wife of a wealthy senator. When the latter surprised the couple, a fight broke out in which Cane strangled the husband. Although he was able to escape with few valuables, he was convicted in absentia and his property was confiscated. He first came to Milan , where he indulged in gambling addiction. However, since he had a strong desire to see Bianca again, he returned to Venice and hid with her. After half a year he was discovered by a rival and thrown into the dungeon of the Doge's Palace . But when he was arrested he was able to hide the stump of a sword in his fist; With this tool he tried to escape by exposing a shaft through the masonry. He did not get outside, but after identifying Arabic characters he crawled to an adjoining room of the Doge's Palace, where large gold treasures and diamonds were stored. Then Cane was able to persuade the guard to flee with him and the treasure. He first embarked for France via the Levant , sold diamonds in London and Amsterdam, and then hid in Madrid for several years. In 1770 he came to Paris with a Spanish name, but a woman he fell in love with, a mistress at the court of Louis XV, deprived him of the rest of his fortune when he threatened to go blind. After a stay in the Bicêtre insane asylum, he ended up in an asylum for the blind, helpless and unable to reveal his true identity. Facino now has only one wish, that of gold:

Je sens l'or. Quoique aveugle, je m'arrête devant les boutiques de joailliers. Cette passion m'a perdu, je suis devenu joueur pour jouer de l'or.
Boulevard Boudon, place of meeting with Facino Canet

He again asks the narrator to accompany him to Venice; he will find the hidden treasures that he thinks he deserves and then make him his heir, the Count of Varese. The narrator reassures him and promises to go to Venice with him; together you set out from Boulevard Bourdon; he takes him back to the asylum for the blind, where he dies a few months later.

background

Francesco Casanova : Portrait of Giacomo Casanova , (around 1750–1755)

With its references to Venice, the short story is reminiscent of Giacomo Casanova and thus resembles Balzac's novella Sarrasine (1831). The narrator hears the unbelievable story of the life of the blind musician who thinks he is a Venetian nobleman, equipped with an unerring nose for gold, a hero of youthful adventures, victim of stolen happiness, escaped the dungeon and now struck by blindness.

The escape from the dungeon is a romantic fantasy in the style of Casanova's legendary escape from the lead chambers of Venice. The horror novel Melmoth der Wanderer by Charles Robert Maturin , a book that Balzac took up in Melmoth Reconcié (1835), was influential . Alexandre Dumas 'novel The Count of Monte Christo (1846), which is one of the most famous prison escape stories, is also part of the genre, followed by Dumas ' La Dame de Monsureau, La Reine Margot and L'Homme au masque de fer . The trick is that the hero of the story can identify the Arabic wall inscriptions of his dead predecessor in his cell, which identifies him as the offspring of a Mediterranean merchant family. The nameless narrator, on the other hand, is an impoverished middle-class intellectual who lives in the midst of the workers in the Marais and vividly observes his surroundings, a characteristic of the revolutionary changes in 19th century literature. The narrator acts in literary invisibility in the role of the “nobleman in disguise”, another feature of the romantic narrative style.

According to Anne Geisler, the novella fits well into the Etudes philosophiques , on the one hand, that it conjures up the peculiarities of the narrator figure:

“I lived very simply and had taken on the conditions of a monk's life, which is necessary for the spiritual worker [...] I wanted to withdraw a single passion from my research life; but wasn't it also part of the course? I observed the customs of the Faubourg, its inhabitants and their characters. "

The counterpart to this is the romantic figure of Facino Cane , who “can smell gold through walls” - both are the ability to seconde vue , a fantastic element that Balzac developed with Louis Lambert (1832). The “determination of the Facino Cane” is symbolically charged, dominated by the monomaniacal greed for gold. Felix Davin wrote in his introduction to the Etudes philosophiques 1834:

"M. de Balzac considère la pensée comme la cause la plus vive de la désorganisation de l'homme. "

The novella fits into the cycle of Balzac's Parisian stories; Venice remains an imaginary place, or maybe even just made up. The identity of the narrator comes to light when Balzac expresses himself:

Je demeurais alors dans une petite rue que vous ne connaissez sans doute pas, la rue Lesdiguières :

So you are in the year 1820; Balzac was then twenty years old and lived in his attic on rue Lesdiguières.

expenditure

  • Honoré de Balzac: Facio Cane . Paris, Delloye et Lecou 1837.
  • German editions:
    • Honoré de Balzac: Facino Cane - Sarrasine. Two novels . Acc .: Hedwig Lachmann. Leipzig, Insel Verlag 1912.
    • Honoré de Balzac: Master novels. Selected and translated by Eva Rechel-Mertens . With an afterword by Felix Sössinger (The Vicar of Tours - Sarrasine - The Unknown Masterpiece - El Verdugo - Facino Cane - A passion in the desert - An episode from the terrible time of Christ in Flanders - The girl with the golden eyes - Melmoth's conversion). Zurich, Manesse-Verlag, 1953.
    • Honoré de Balzac: The officials. Human Comedy, Volume 13, Scenes from Parisian Life . Fritz-Georg Voigt (ed.) (The officials; the businessman; Pierre Grassou; Facino Cane; Sarrasine; a prince of the bohemian; comedians without knowing it). Berlin and Weimar, construction, 1980.

bibliography

  • Raffaele de Cesare, Balzac ei temi italiani di 'Facino Cane', Mélanges à la mémoire de Franco Simone: France et Italie dans la culture européenne, III: XIXe-XXe , Genève, Slatkine, 1984, pp. 313-325.
  • Jacques-David Ebguy, Le Récit comme vision: Balzac voyant dans 'Facino Cane' , In: L'Année balzacienne, 1998, n ° 19 pp. 149-67.
  • Esther Rashkin, Phantom Legacies: Balzac's Facino Cane , Romanic Review , Nov. 1989, n ° 80 (4), pp. 529-40.

Web links

Wikisource: Facino Cane  - Sources and full texts (French)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Balzac Project
  2. ↑ Jacques Casanova de Seingalt: Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la République de Venise qu'on appelle les Plombs. Ecrite a Dux en Boheme l'année 1787 . Leipzig 1788
  3. ↑ Quotation from the Insel edition 1912, p. 5
  4. ^ History of Facino Cane at Maison de Balzac