Henri de Marsay is a much more ambitious and a much more interesting figure. In him are combined the attractions of criminality, beauty, brains, success, and, last of all, dandyism. It is a well-known and delightful fact that the most Anglophobe Frenchmen--and Balzac might fairly be classed among them--have always regarded the English dandy with half-jealous, half-awful admiration. Indeed, our novelist, it will be seen, found it necessary to give Marsay English blood. But there is a tradition that this young Don Juan--not such a good fellow as Byron’s, nor such a _grand seigneur_ as Moliere’s--was partly intended to represent Charles de Remusat, who is best known to this generation by very sober and serious philosophical works, and by his part in his mother’s correspondence. I do not know that there ever were any imputation on M. de Remusat’s morals; but in memoirs of the time, he is, I think, accused of a certain selfishness and _hauteur_, and he certainly made his way, partly by journalism, partly by society, to power very much as Marsay did. But Marsay would certainly not have written _Abelard_ and the rest, or have returned to Ministerial rank in our own time. Marsay, in fact, more fortunate than Rubempre, and of a higher stamp and flight than Rastignac, makes with them Balzac’s trinity of sketches of the kind of personage whose part, in his day and since, every young Frenchman has aspired to play, and some have played. It cannot be said that “a moral man is Marsay”; it cannot be said that he has the element of good-nature which redeems Rastignac. But he bears a blame and a burden for which we Britons are responsible in part--the Byronic ideal of the guilty hero coming to cross and blacken the old French model of unscrupulous good humor. It is not a very pretty mixture or a very worthy ideal; but I am not so sure that it is not still a pretty common one.
The association of the three stories forming the _Histoire des Treize_ is, in book form, original, inasmuch as they filled three out of the four volumes of _Etudes des Moeurs_ published in 1834-35, and themselves forming part of the first collection of _Scenes de la Vie Parisienne_. But _Ferragus_ had appeared in parts (with titles to each) in the _Revue de Paris_ for March and April 1833, and part of _La Duchesse de Langeais_ in the _Echo de la Jeune France_ almost contemporaneously. There are divisions in this also. _Ferragus_ and _La Duchesse_ also appeared without _La Fille aux Yeux d’Or_ in 1839, published in one volume by Charpentier, before their absorption at the usual time in the _Comedie_.