Honoré de Balzac. The Wrong Side of Paris. New York: Modern Library, 2005. $17, 272pp.
At the 2024 Baylor Symposium on Faith and Culture, themed “Renewing and Reimagining Institutions for the Common Good,” Tish Harrison Warren gave the closing plenary address. Among many other things in a very compelling address, she mentioned that she and her husband have a motto they have posted in their home, “go slow and repair things.” It is immediately familiar as the opposite of “go fast and break things,” the motto of Silicon Valley and plenty of people who believe in the power of disruption.
“Go slow and repair things” has not often been a first instinct among people who want to change the world. The modern era kicked off with the “Age of Revolutions”—American, French, Haitian, Industrial, etc. When we want to make the world a better place, we are inclined to pursue big changes and overhaul things, basically “go fast and break things.” And it would not be an exaggeration to say that speed is practically a virtue among us. We will sometimes accept slow food, but everything else ought to be instant. Slow traffic is akin to “the times that try men’s souls.” As a result of our love for speed and revolution, in our era we have relatively few ready examples of going slow and repairing things.
One unexpected example of going slow and repairing things as a Christian approach to improving the world can be found in the novel known as The Wrong Side of Paris or The Seamy Side of History, by Honoré de Balzac. In the 1800s, Balzac wrote nearly a hundred novels as part of his “Human Comedy” series. The novels were meant to portray all of French life, in the country and the city, private and public, people of every background and type, with observations on the past and present. The Wrong Side of Paris is hardly the most famous book in the series, but it is a very interesting book.
The protagonist in The Wrong Side of Paris is a man named Godefroid. His parents had a bit of money and raised him to succeed in the world, but he has been foolish with his money, lived beyond his means, ruined his chance of getting married, and is now around thirty and without friends or prospects. He has ambition, but lacks the will and discipline to make things happen. He is adrift. He is described as “unfitted to struggle against circumstances, having an inward consciousness of superior faculties without the will that could put them in action, feeling himself incomplete, without force to undertake any great thing, without resistance against the tastes derived from his earlier life, his education, and his indolence, he was the victim of three maladies, any one of which would be enough to sicken of life a young man long alienated from religious faith.”
Godefroid is at the end of his ability to make something of his life and he is determined to economize. He finds some cheap rooms to rent, in a house with courtyard behind the Notre Dame. It is quiet, beyond modest, and the inhabitants are a handful of old men and the landlady, an older woman named Madame de la Chanterie. They close the gates every night at ten o’clock and one of the residents, a priest, describes the home as a “convent.” Madame de la Chanterie tells Godefroid “We lead here a Christian life, which does not, as you know, accord with many superfluities; I think you have too many as it is.” Her frankness surprises Godefroid, but the situation suits him. He is hoping to pay off his debts and slowly establish a modest life that he can sustain.
This life is far from what Godefroid has been living or aspiring to, but something about the house and its inhabitants intrigues him and he decides to rent the rooms. Godefroid realizes he is living among people who are practically a secret society. He learns that all the men in the house have extremely distinguished pasts. People high in society quietly come and go. He wonders if they are part of a monarchist conspiracy. They are certainly an unofficial religious society of some kind. The whole household rises early for prayers, they read The Imitation of Christ daily, they eat simply, and they carry on mysterious activities. Soon enough, Godefroid is reading The Imitation of Christ for himself and trying to become a better person and true believer. Balzac writes, “Godefroid found these five associated persons endowed with the qualities they required in him. They were all without pride, without vanity, truly humble and pious; also without any of the pretension which constitutes devotion, using that word in its worst sense. These virtues were contagious; he was filled with a desire to imitate these hidden heroes, and he ended by passionately studying the book he had begun by despising.”
As he progresses in his faith, Godefroid is initiated into the circle of “hidden heroes.” They are not a monarchist conspiracy, but people who are entirely devoted to charity. Monsieur Alain explains the group’s activities to him:
“We practice charity as our great and sublime Saint Paul defines it; for, my dear lad, we think that charity, and charity alone, which is Love, can heal the wounds of Paris. In our eyes, misery, of whatever kind, poverty, suffering, misfortune, grief, evil, no matter how produced, or in what social class they show themselves, have equal rights. Whatever his opinions or beliefs, an unhappy man is, before all else, an unhappy man; and we ought not to attempt to turn his face to our holy mother Church until we have saved him from despair or hunger. Moreover, we ought to convert him to goodness more by example and by gentleness than by any other means; and we believe that God will specially help us in this. All constraint is bad. Of the manifold Parisian miseries, the most difficult to discover, and the bitterest, is that of worthy persons of the middle classes who have fallen into poverty; for they make concealment a point of honor.
Those sorrows, my dear Godefroid, are to us the object of special solicitude. Such persons usually have intelligence and good hearts. They return to us, sometimes with usury, the sums that we lend them. Such restitutions recoup us in the long run for the losses we occasionally incur through impostors, shiftless creatures, or those whom misfortunes have rendered stupid. Through such persons we often obtain invaluable help in our investigations. Our work has now become so vast, its details are so multifarious, that we no longer suffice of ourselves to carry it on.
So, for the last year we have a physician of our own in every arrondissement in Paris. Each of us takes general charge of four arrondissements. We pay each physician three thousand francs a year to take care of our poor. His time belongs to us in the first instance, but we do not prevent him from attending other sick persons if he can. Would you believe that for many months we were unable to find twelve really trustworthy, valuable men, in spite of all our own efforts and those of our friends? We could not employ any but men of absolute discreetness, pure lives, sound knowledge, experience, active men, and lovers of doing good. Now, although there are in Paris some ten thousand individuals, more or less, who would gladly do the work, we could not find twelve to meet our needs in a whole year.”
They are actively helping 5,000 families and millions of francs are involved. They do it all quietly, as secretly as possible. In the streets, the members of this small association do not even acknowledge each other. Secrets are safe with this association and they derive no public praise from their activities. They are trusted and respected by the best bankers and have been the benefactors of some of the best families.
Once initiated, Godefroid is sent on his first mission. He is to become a neighbor to a family that seems to be both quite noble and desperately poor, and to see if he can alleviate their pain. He befriends the father, pays their outstanding debts, secures medical care for the ailing daughter, finds legal help for the family, and works to right their situation. As he learns the ways of charity and service to others, he also unexpectedly plays a part in a larger drama involving some of the other characters. It is a novel, after all.
Though fiction, The Wrong Side of Paris offers some guidelines for what “go slow and repair things” might look like. The members of this “order” live very simply. They do not indulge in luxuries or personal ambition. Their lives are governed by religious rhythms and animated by a Christian understanding of charity. They live by the motto “transire benefaciendo,” which means “to travel along while doing good.”
The order is insistent upon doing their good quietly. They want to remain anonymous and each individual makes certain not to personally appear as the benefactor in any situation. It is also made clear that they do works of charity, but they do not build an empire. On Godefroid’s mission, he recognizes that the man he is helping needs an honest publisher. The association could publish his work, but Madame de la Chanterie explains that they ought not to become publishers, or builders, or anything else. They are not establishing enterprises. Their mission is specific and narrow and they stick to it.
Balzac also emphasizes the power of association, presenting it in capital letters and considering it “one of the greatest social forces, and that which made the Europe of the middle-ages.” For Balzac, it has been defeated by the French Revolution and secularism and the spirit of individualism. From his perspective, “the only societies which actually exist are those of religious bodies, against whom a heavy war is being made at this moment; for the natural tendency of sick persons is to quarrel with remedies and often with physicians. France ignores self-abnegation. Therefore, no association can live except through religious sentiment; the only sentiment that quells the rebellions of mind, the calculations of ambition, and greeds of all kinds. The seekers of better worlds ignore the fact that ASSOCIATION has such worlds to offer.” Once Godefroid has joined this association, “he was no longer a mere man, he was a tenfold force, knowing himself the representative of persons whose united forces upheld his actions and walked beside him.”
Proximity also plays an important role in the work of the characters in The Wrong Side of Paris. The life that Godefroid is initiated into is centered around a community of people living together. The residents take meals together and work together on the plans and accounts of the organization. They also jointly own a small farm outside of town which provides their fruit and vegetables. It is hard to imagine that one of the characters alone would be able to have such a dramatic effect on the city of Paris—though The Country Doctor by Balzac does feature a doctor who has raised the standard of living of an entire community through his efforts (he is also referenced in this book as a like-minded individual, who exceeds many in his charity).
The workers of charity in The Wrong Side of Paris also operate in proximity to those they aid. When they learn of the family that Godefroid is to help, he is sent to be their neighbor and live in their building. His first job is to establish a relationship and learn to fully understand the situation and the struggles of the family, so that he can discern what is best for them. He is not meant to judge or aid from a remove. He is very personally involved with the family’s situation. While he is doing that, Monsieur Alain is working as an overseer in a factory, so that he can develop a relationship with the workers there and work to improve the conditions at the factory. He may live and work as an overseer for months or a year—the idea is to be inserted into the situation and do good within. This is an especially radical idea.
The organization learns of needs from the outside, but all the good work is essentially done from inside the bad situations. Such a thing would not be the basis of any 501(c)(3) or church outreach program today. The people in the house do not establish grants or schools or tutoring programs or zoning –they move into neighborhoods (not as missionaries), they get jobs under bad bosses, they labor beside people, and they seek to avoid being identified as benefactors. And this is not a settlement in a bad neighborhood, but an individual sent out to live and work among those in need, as a neighbor. Can you imagine your deacons deciding who should go to work at the meatpacking factory for six months or a year, to improve the lives of the workers? Or who should work at McDonald’s for as long as it takes to understand and improve the lives of the employees? Could you imagine being part of a group that reaches out to doctors in town, to find out about particularly needy but deserving families? Or having millions of dollars in charity in circulation—without anyone knowing?
The Wrong Side of Paris is neither Balzac’s best work or a handbook for social change. It is not even entirely unobjectionable. In this book, and elsewhere, Balzac is a staunch traditionalist, a nineteenth-century conservative. Alongside Christianity, he advocates for the monarchy. In fact, in a scene where Madame de la Chanterie powerfully forgives another character, she says: “In the name of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette whom I see on their scaffold, in the name of Madame Elisabeth, in the name of my daughter and of yours, and for Jesus’ sake, I forgive you.” Monsieur Alain’s mission to live among workers at a factory includes ending their talk of socialism. But despite the excessive love for nobility and monarchy and a rosy view of the traditional past, Balzac presents a compelling narrative about the exciting experience of doing good, something we rarely see.
So many books and films and shows derive their excitement from wickedness. There are murders, kidnappings, and criminal schemes. Evil does not always triumph, but even when the denouement brings victory for good, it still often includes guns and bombs and well-aimed fists or at least a strict application of the justice system. The excitement comes with car chases and explosions and quick actions and decisive court scenes. The Wrong Side of Paris suggests that good can be intriguing and thrilling, even up close, even when it is quiet. Observing his new neighbors closely at the beginning of the story, Godefroid “had noticed the coming and going of several persons whose appearance and behavior, without being exactly mysterious, excited a belief that some secret occupation or profession was being carried on in that house.” When Monsieur Alain explains the activities of the household to Godefroid, he has to tell him not to think of it like an episode of Arabian Nights.
Now that he is entranced by good, Godefroid himself recognizes that he has believed evil and vice to be more fascinating than virtue. Now he asks about a virtuous life: “What romances, even those that are most famous, can equal such realities?” The possibilities excite him. “What a life it will be to relieve the burden of such existences, to seek out causes and effects and remedy them, calming sorrows, helping good; to incarnate one’s own being in misery; to familiarize one’s self with homes like that; to act out constantly in life those dramas which move us so in fiction! I never imagined that good could be more interesting, more piquant than vice.” This turns out to be true in application. In his first “duel with misery” he finds the purpose and nobility that he has lacked. Though his self-interest matters less than ever before, he has an enlarged sense of self. Godefroid “felt within him a plenitude of life, a noble might, which uplifted him…he was conscious of a new sense, an omnipotence more sure than that of despots. Moral power is, like thought, limitless.”
One way to take Tish Harrison Warren’s encouragement to “go slow and repair things” seriously might be to look at the examples we can find, to consider what a lived approach to the motto would be. The Wrong Side of Paris offers one example of what it might look like to intentionally live that motto in a specifically Christian way and it suggests that virtue can be more exciting than vice. This book may also be known as The Seamy Side of History, but it certainly suggests that “go slow and repair things” is a way to be on the so-called “right side of history.”
Topics:
