Foreword

The Atlas de la Comédie Humaine aims to offer all readers, from the experienced balzacien to the enthusiastic novie, an electronic, enriched, version of the various repertories, currently or formerly in print.

The usefulness of such work, or of its predecessors, is self-explanatory. The invention of recurring characters (as early as 1833 according to his sister Laure Surville), the formalization of the concept in various prefaces, the publishing of the first big crossroads that was le Père Goriot in 1835, open the gates for imaginative powers so fertile as to amaze readers to this day.

The catalogue of future works, as well as the expansive Avant-propos in 1842, certainly reveal Balzac as a careful builder, anxious to establish various pillars for his oeuvre. The creative act that summons a teeming society is but one of these pillars, alongside a moral system, a scientific legitimacy, and a metaphysical basis. All were ultimately in the limelight of major books, but the Comédie Humaine as it was left to us is quite remote from the geometric sobriety of an austere philosophical system, as it is from the cathedral architecture of Proust's novel. And how could it, when the generative principles defined by the author himself, together with a sometimes uncontrollable creativity, lead to a luxuriance that would have needed several lifetimes to tame.

Reading les Paysans has been especially striking to me; from a fairly simple outline, which another writer could have made quick work of, threading his story around a couple protagonists, Balzac pulls a mind-boggling tangle of provincial dynasties whose marriages, rivalries, business of all kinds form an impressive web, certainly complex, but which our demiurge imprints masterfully into the reader's mind, thanks to the lively description of its personalities, and the sharp characterization of their classes. The novel is unfinished, alas, as if the horizontal expansion of the Balzacian universe, somewhat uncontrolled in this late phase of his creative career, had come to hinder the vertical progression of the novel's tale.

In his last years, under the shadow of "guignon", said Baudelaire, Balzac can spare no time to revisit his past works, obsessed as he is by financial constraints, his thirst for recognition, and creative impulses that always push him forward. We can count on his to augment the already obese directory of his characters, rather than work on their taxonomy. That task was then left to future generations.

The viscount Lovenjoul, great collector of literary manuscripts, also became one of the first practitioners of a genetic approach to literature, patiently tracing the ties between sketches, proofs, prints and revisions. His Histoire des oeuvres in 1879 served as an indispensable source for Anatole Cerfbeer and Jules Christophe in their great endeavour: the 1887 Répertoire de la Comédie Humaine, a biographical dictionary of all characters created by Balzac. Two and a half thousand of them are given a short biography, with clear references to the relevant books. As we shall see, the Répertoire is the main source for this Atlas.

Generation follows generation. Maurice Bouteron becomes the balzacien capital; he published Balzac's complete works and presides over the Cahiers balzaciens review in the 1920s. The Comédie Humaine is naturally one of the first works to be published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, between 1935 and 1937 in ten volumes, under the same Bouteron. In that same era, Fernand Lotte commences the meticulous work that will bear fruit at last in 1953 with the publishing of a Dictionnaire Biographique de la Comédie Humaine, a more rigorous, more exhaustive version of the Répertoire, that incorporates the intervening decades of erudite work, in particular the study of sketches that Cerfbeer and Christophe could not know about. Lotte also goes so far as to include anonymous characters: the "uncles of", "servant of", poor orphans of Balzacian onomastics. The Dictionnaire was adjoined to a late XIth volume of the Bouteron Pléiade, in 1960. At last, between 1976 and 1981, the second Pléiade edition (under Pierre-Georges Castex), comes to light. It is still the unsurpassable reference to this day. Its crowning jewel is volume XII and its indexes, established by Anne-Marie Meininger and Pierre Citron, which rebuild and considerably enrich Lotte's Dictionnaire.

Our own Atlas uses Cerfbeer and Christophe's Répertoire as its main source, and thus has little claim to exhaustivity or scientific rigor, due to the intrinsic imperfection of the 1887 materials. The transfer of the Répertoire's biographic notices to a database itself carries its load of unavoidable errors which only a thorough examination will eliminate. The reader should then consider this Atlas as a useful resource or a rsearch tool, but also to accept its limitations (which we hope to overcome, eventually).

With this warning in tow, let's take a look at the content, starting with the atoms, or primary objects of our dataset. Since we lean on biographic notices, these are of course characters.

The only metatextual link featured here is the one between these characters and the books in which they appear. Those appearances are treated on equal footing, without any distinction between main characters, secondary ones, and "extras", though that distinction would help separate, among the repeat recurring cast the bit players from the "stars", focal points of the Balzacian fresco. We also propose a graph: it represents the various books in proportion to their length, as well as the links between them, thick or thin, whether they share few or many characters.

Let's move to the world of the Comédie proper. The central attribute of its characters remains their social status, which we have summarized here as their profession. This will naturally evoke the ubiquitous bankers, solicitors, doctors, journalists or magistrates that always abound n Balzac's world. But, from plasterer to mathematician, from lacemaker to pedicure, from poet to admiral, few callings have escaped Balzac's almighty sieve. A natural consequence of many character' re-appearance: social status is not static: a shopkeeper becomes mayor, a merchant enters parliament, a journalist is made prefect... In future works, we will refine professions into a more generalized concept of status; the "idle" members of society (often women, or aristocrats) represent subtle, yet crucial, nuances, which have been abundantly studied in the literature.

A binary predicate this time, relationships are the very frame of social structures. Family ties first, professional or economic hierarchies, and the motley crew of passions: love, friendship, rivalry, enmity... Our data describes more than four thousands relationships (of forty-seven types), but is still far from being exhaustive since it only relies on the Répertoire's short notices, as opposed to the whole text.

Family ties lead us to an attempt at classifying families more generally. It relies on two additional sources: Lecour's genealogical tables in his Personnages de la Comédie Humaine (1966), and the family trees by Anne-Marie Meininger. Those sources expose a qualitative approach to family delineation; its soundness is guaranteed by the authors' erudition. To stay faithful to our more systematic approach, we have circumvented the issue by defining four levels, in concentric circles: the house (scions of a shared ancestor who also share a family name, plus their spouses), the lineage (same concept without a name constraint), the kindred (a group with blood ties, plus spouses, which can then assemble collateral branches, without any named common ancestor), and lastly the family in the broadest sense ( a maximal group in the sense of all family ties, including in-laws, second marriages, etc.).

To conclude, locations: our biographic notices often tell us where a character lived, worked, sometimes where they were born or died. Paris of course dominates, followed by Arcis, Soulanges, Alençon, Angoulême, Provins, Issoudun, or Balzac's dear Tours. Sometimes, we get more precise mentions, down to a street (most likely Parisian); sometimes they only refer to a whole country, to America, to the Indies. Period-accurate maps (of the world, of France, of Paris) shall help the reader's orientation.