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Colonel Chabert

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Carol Cosman's translation of Balzac's French 'Colonel Chabert' into the English has been very effective here- she does not input her own interpretations and seems to have a good handle on Balzac's natural, concise wording style.

The story itself is fascinating. In a nutshell, it focuses on a military man who is essentially erased from society, and the tribulations and insights he has from this 'non-existant' state as he tries to re-establish himself. Not only is this a witty and profound social commentary, but an entertaining twist which just keeps twisting.

In reading other's reviews of this short masterpiece, it seems as if many people have missed the meaning of the finale. While it is indeed a very enigmatic ending, it is not as lugubrious or fatalistic as most believe. What happens is that Colonel Chabert, in essentially having his old identity annihilated, becomes enlighted. In the ultimate destruction of his ego he becomes free. This is the magic finale which Balzac labors so hard, and so majestically, to set up in the plot.

This tome is very impressive, and relatively short (just over 100 pages) for those new to Balzac who want a nice, piquant appetizer. Balzac is one of the most brilliant French fiction writers of all time! He is a giant, and in 'Colonel Chabert', he weaves another illustrious stitch into his tapestry the Comedie Humaine.

...of a great Balzac novella. Ms. Cosman captures the rigorous, logical quality of Balzac's prose - most translators get lost in unidiomatic wordiness. This 100 page novella showcases the Master's comfort with legal matters, his profound understanding of "the fang and the claw" and features at its center the incomparable Derville, Balzac's great, recurring lawyer character. I usually recommend Pere Goriot for first-time Balzac readers because of the rich connections between that novel and many other Balzac works - but I am hard pressed to imagine a better one-course meal than this rendering of Colonel Chabert by Ms. Cosman. I certainly plan to read her version of The Girl with the Golden Eyes.

Carol Cosman does a masterful job of translating Balzac's story of COLONEL CHABERT. The book is 101 pages of fast and fascinating reading. I loved Balzac's quip about the three professionals who cannot appreciate the world: the priest, the doctor, and the lawyer... the unhappiest of whom is the lawyer whose "offices are gutters that cannot be cleansed." Everyone should read this book. It will appeal equally to realists and optimists and to those who partake in social criticism or simply enjoy a good story.

Chabert, a colonel in Napoleon's army, and given up for dead after the battle of Eylau, returns to France to claim his wife, his good name and his fortune.

During the intervening period his wife has legally re-married (a man with strong ambitions to enter the Peerage (périe de France), and borne him two children. The husband's ambitions are thwarted, however; his wife is closely linked with the Bonapartist era but now the political climate has changed and she is considered suspect.

Chabert's re-appearance upsets everything; his wife's re-marriage could be annuled and her children declared illegitimate.

Both Chabert and his wife want to do right by each other; Chabert wants the restoration of his name and fortune, but his wife naturally fears the annulment of her present marriage and its consequences to her children.

Enter the lawyer, Maître Derville, with his "protocol susceptible de réunir l'adhésion des deux parties". Some readers have interpreted Derville's role as crooked. This is not so. Derville, too, wants to be fair to both sides and, under the circumstances, does what he can.

A poignant tale of how fate conspires to rob humans of the people and things they cherish most.

Surely, one of Balzac's best.

Balzac, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, did not trip up with this one. I read it with great pleasure and conclude, as people so often say, that the movie based on the story did not equal the original. Ever the cynic (some might say 'the realist') Balzac portrays here the efforts of a noble-minded soldier, who rose from an orphanage to serve his country under Napoleon in Egypt and eastern Europe, only to reap the all-too-common fate of dedicated and true warriors---to be forgotten and ignored. Death (which he accepted) might have seized him, but he found a living death, a denial of his sanity and identity, as the reward of his service. Reported killed at the battle of Eylau, against the Russians, after a heroic action, the soldier literally crawls from his grave to a kind of shadowy survival. In his earlier life, Colonel Chabert had raised a woman to his own status, but now finds that she is unwilling to let others learn of her origins and does not want to recognize that he is, in fact, her long lost husband. Honestly thinking she was widowed, she married a highborn aristocrat who knew nothing of her humble beginnings.

The tale is one of greed, intrigue, loyalty and disloyalty. As usual, Balzac manages to cast a light, pitiless and bright, on every rotten corner of the human condition, while offering a few inspiring examples in contrast. Every detail of a lawyer's life in 19th century Paris is scrutinized, every glimpse of urban dairyman or elite country squirehood rings true. No wonder I admire him so much, no wonder I have no hesitation in urging you to read COLONEL CHABERT and any other volume of Balzac you can lay your hands on.

One of the greatest novelists of all time, Balzac was most at home in the Paris of Post-Napoleonic Paris. In a time when the middle class was showing its strength and starting to reach towards the aristocracy, Balzac shows just how selfish and grubby and greedy humans can be in attaining and how treacherous they can be in keeping their all important upward mobility.

Colonel Chabert is a man disfigured in the Napoleonic Wars who was left for dead on a battlefield. After digging his way out of a mass grave, he finds that he has no legal right to his title or his massive estate. Nobody will believe his true identity. For ten longe years he goes about trying to communicate his plight to anyone who will listen. They only see a crazy bum, and his wife rebuffs his letters. She already has a new husband and kids. Finally Chabert is able to convince a lawyer named Dervilles to accept his case, namely that of reclaiming his title, lands, and wife. The problem is that noone is really interested in his life being resurrected. Most people would rather that he remained dead. So begins the ludicrous battle of a man against the law to prove his own existence.

This short but great novel, or novella, is a tragic take on the world's thirst for social status and the judgement by visuals that our society is only too guilty of to this day. If it walks like a bum, talks like a bum, it must be a bum. Colonel Chabert has such a hard time convincing people of his identity because of how they perceive him. It sounds echoes of Frankenstein in that a good man is reduced to a monster when all he really needs is love. The fact that even his wife wishes he were dead just drives home the isolated suffering of the book. As in all Balzac novels, you feel a world moving under the mantle of the book. The Human Comedy of Balzac is one of the crowning achievements of literature and ranks right up there with Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy.

With this novel, Balzac continued to place himself among the most influential and appreciated writers of world literature. Balzac, along with Shakespeare, gave a new meaning to the word "human". This is an extraordinary and rich novel narrating the glory and downfall of Colonel Chabert. I won't summarize the whole work here since I imagine that you have had enough of that so far, so I will just say that this novel is about a human being's inability to re-enter a society that has long forgotten about him. The imagery in this novel is extraordinary and a wonderful scene occurs when the Colonel is first described: poking through the darkness...like a Rembrandt and that careful construction of light and darkness. It is exquisite! Don't miss this novel. If you like this one, I recommend: Le Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Cousine Bette, and La Peau de Chagrin. Enjoy!

This novella focuses on the quixotic journey of Colonel Chabert, a remnant of a society long since gone. Ambition, driven by the intense pursuit of money, is the currency of the new bourgeoise society. Honor is a thing of the past. "The only thing the poor can do is love," Chabert says at one point and it might be too much of a truism, but having seen the corruption of the world around him, maybe it is so. Colonel Chabert has travelled the heart of darkness that is 19th Century France.

"Colonel Chabert" is one of Honore de Balzac's volumes from his omnibus work, "The Human Comedy." The Colonel is a comic figure in and old military great coat and a wig who is ridiculed by young legal workers at the beginning of the novel. But, the joke is on the clerks, because Chabert is a war hero of the Napoleonic era who was given up for dead on a battlefield at Eylau. This translation from the French by Carol Grosman tells the story of the old soldier's resurrection in contemporary jargon. The novel is relevant today considering the service of soldiers in many wars continuing in our world. What happens to these heroes when wars end, or more accurately, shift to new fronts? Balzac paints the portrait of one old colonel who remains honorable and as a consequence seals his fate. The translation is very readable and the short novel is brief "scene from private life." The work will stimulate further interest in the monumental work of Balzac who had a relatively short life (1799-1850).