Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

This open-mindedness made Ligne into one of the very first, and greatest, of truly modern Europeans. His Belgian birth predisposed him in this respect[4]: he described himself as a “Flemish gentleman” but “a Walloon in the army,”[5] and wrote that “I like my standing as a foreigner everywhere, French in Austria, Austrian in France, both of them in Russia. This is the way to succeed everywhere,” for “one loses esteem in a country that one dwells in all the time.” (This is profoundly true; Pascal had said roughly the same thing, in different words.)

Two passions, as noted earlier, dominated the life of the Prince de Ligne: he loved war and he loved women.

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Warfare was the sole function of Ligne’s caste, its very raison d’être, its honour and duty. For Ligne valour was the cardinal virtue, he preferred a country full of bandits to one full of petty criminals, for bandits at least display courage when they risk their lives in the exercise of their skills. War was the chief occupation of Ligne’s life, and was accordingly the subject of a good portion of the thirty-four volumes of his collected works ( Mélanges militaires, littéraires et sentimentaires [Military, Literary and Sentimental Miscellany]). An anecdote will serve to illustrate the odd intimacy that the Prince entertained with his military vocation. He cherished his son Charles more than any other being in the world, but no sooner was the boy of an age to ride a horse than he led him into action: “I set in motion a small vanguard engagement with the Prussians, and, charging on horseback alongside him I took his little hand in mine as we galloped, and when I had the first shot fired told him: ‘how fine it would be, my Charles, should we suffer a slight wound together.’” (Eventually, some twenty years later, when Charles was thirty-three, he was decapitated by a French cannonball. At the news of his son’s death the Prince passed out. He remained unconsolable.) [6]

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As for women, the catalogue of his conquests (by no means all glorious) is longer and more varied that Don Giovanni’s as sung by Leporello: his immense range extended from prostitutes to crowned heads. What kind of hunger drove him in this regard? He was, so to speak, in love with love: “In love only the beginning is delightful. I am not surprised that we get so much pleasure from beginning over and over again.”

On this topic two remarks of Ligne’s are worth mentioning. The first is a joke, but of course jokes can be more revealing than serious statements. In a letter, the Prince recalls a bantering conversation with the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia; the three were considering what one might most wish to be: “For my part, I told them that I would like to be a pretty woman until the age of thirty , then a very lucky and very able army general until sixty, and a cardinal until eighty.” The second observation is a remarkable one, noted in Ligne’s Mes écarts , and marks him off in a radical and surprising way from Don Juan as from his old friend and fellow-adventurer Casanova: “It is a real and abominable crime to interfere with a marriage of love. Since this is the highest of joys, he who would seek to deprive two loving spouses of it ought to be punished. Can anything else be worth the continual happiness enjoyed by two people who are made for each other?”

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The Prince de Ligne had scant respect for what we would nowadays call academic knowledge: “I do not care for scholars unless they are scholars without wishing to be or without knowing it. There is nothing easier than becoming a scholar. To acquire learning, it suffices to lock oneself up in one’s house for six months. It is far better to have a good imagination than a good memory.” What would he have thought of those interminable and exhausting biographies, so fashionable today, produced by pen-pushers who, knowing everything and understanding nothing, pile up mountains of ponderous and insignificant data with which to bury some hapless poet, some fine artist or some other victim of their choosing? In stark contrast, Sophie Deroisin, with her intuitive approach and her light (but penetrating) touch, would seem to be well in harmony with the taste and disposition of her seductive subject.

Casanova, who knew his illustrious friend very well, offered him this insightful comment: “Your mind is of the kind which lends impetus to the minds of others.” It is surely that same impetus which animates the pages you are about to read. Sophie Deroisin was a “sensitive soul” in the Stendhalian sense: she had as much heart as intelligence; she loved to admire, and she suffered joyfully from chronic enthusiasm. “Enthusiasm is the finest of faults,” wrote the Prince de Ligne. “It is better to be wrong with enthusiasm than right in some other way.” But enthusiasm certainly did not lead Sophie Deroisin astray, even if it may have shielded her from certain parts of the picture. Ligne is the incarnation of the eighteenth century, as we said at the outset, and Sophie Deroisin has an admirable grasp of the grace of that era, but she prefers not to see it in all its alarming ferocity, filth, cruelty, mud and blood. Ligne, however, had both feet firmly planted in all that (so did Mozart). On that the academic historians give us plenty of concrete detail. But their view, though perhaps more complete, is not necessarily more true. In his old age, in Vienna, a voluntary exile from his beloved Beloeil — which he was prevented from seeing only by “humour [i.e., mood], horror, and honour”—Ligne knew poverty. Contemporary witnesses describe him as a hirsute, wigless old man who “smelled very bad.” Others report that he had an ass, a sheep and a goat which every morning jumped up on his bed begging for food. The two accounts, equally reliable, are by no means contradictory, but the scholarly biographies retain only the former, Sophie Deroisin only the latter. It seems to me that she was not wrong.

Emerson said that “books are for nothing but to inspire.” There could be no better description of the worth of this one.

*Preface to Sophie Deroisin, Le Prince de Ligne.

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ARTHUR Waley said that he preferred to read Dickens in Chinese translation (Dickens’s first Chinese translator was indeed an exquisite writer). I wonder if Balzac does not also belong to the category of writers who actually benefit from being translated. I suspect that his visionary imagination would remain unaffected by the transposition into another language, whereas it would be relatively easy for tactful translators to soften the jarring notes and straighten the blunders that, in the original, frequently jolt the reader or threaten, at the most dramatic moments, to set off anticlimactic laughter.

Balzac’s prose is littered with ludicrous conceits, mixed metaphors, clichés and various manifestations of naïveté and bad taste. Mere haste and negligence cannot fully account for so much awkwardness; although his first drafts were often dashed off at astounding speed and in enormous creative bursts, Balzac was also a painstaking, obsessive — and notorious — re-writer. His revisions, corrections, re-corrections and corrections of re-corrections that swelled into the margins of his galley proofs, smothering the printed text under their exuberant growth, famously drove typesetters to fury and despair.

That such a great writer should have written so badly was a source of puzzlement for some of the best connoisseurs (who were also his warmest admirers), from Baudelaire to Flaubert. The paradox was aptly summed up by Flaubert himself: “What a man Balzac would have been had he known how to write! But that was the only thing he lacked. After all, an artist would never have accomplished so much, nor had such breadth.”