Unconscious Comedians | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] and
Dagny, [email protected]

UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Monsieur le Comte Jules de Castellane.

UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS

Leon de Lora, our celebrated landscape painter, belongs to one of the
noblest families of the Roussillon (Spanish originally) which, although
distinguished for the antiquity of its race, has been doomed for a
century to the proverbial poverty of hidalgos. Coming, light-footed, to
Paris from the department of the Eastern Pyrenees, with the sum of
eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum, he had in some degree
forgotten the miseries and privations of his childhood and his family
amid the other privations and miseries which are never lacking to
"rapins," whose whole fortune consists of intrepid vocation. Later, the
cares of fame and those of success were other causes of forgetfulness.
If you have followed the capricious and meandering course of these
studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinner's pupil, one of
the heroes of "A Start in Life" (Scenes from Private Life), and his brief
apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter, emulator of
the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more the
shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he
owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de
Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the house
of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute and an
officer of the Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has an income
of twenty thousand francs from the Funds, his pictures sell for their
weight in gold, and (what seems to him more extraordinary than the
invitations he receives occasionally to court balls) his name and fame,

mentioned so often for the last sixteen years by the press of Europe, has
at last penetrated to the valley of the Eastern Pyrenees, where vegetate
three veritable Loras: his father, his eldest brother, and an old paternal
aunt, Mademoiselle Urraca y Lora.
In the maternal line the painter has no relation left except a cousin, the
nephew of his mother, residing in a small manufacturing town in the
department. This cousin was the first to bethink himself of Leon. But it
was not until 1840 that Leon de Lora received a letter from Monsieur
Sylvestre Palafox-Castal-Gazonal (called simply Gazonal) to which he
replied that he was assuredly himself,--that is to say, the son of the late
Leonie Gazonal, wife of Comte Fernand Didas y Lora.
During the summer of 1841 cousin Sylvestre Gazonal went to inform
the illustrious unknown family of Lora that their little Leon had not
gone to the Rio de la Plata, as they supposed, but was now one of the
greatest geniuses of the French school of painting; a fact the family did
not believe. The eldest son, Don Juan de Lora assured his cousin
Gazonal that he was certainly the dupe of some Parisian wag.
Now the said Gazonal was intending to go to Paris to prosecute a
lawsuit which the prefect of the Eastern Pyrenees had arbitrarily
removed from the usual jurisdiction, transferring it to that of the
Council of State. The worthy provincial determined to investigate this
act, and to ask his Parisian cousin the reason of such high-handed
measures. It thus happened that Monsieur Gazonal came to Paris, took
shabby lodgings in the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs, and was amazed
to see the palace of his cousin in the rue de Berlin. Being told that the
painter was then travelling in Italy, he renounced, for the time being,
the intention of asking his advice, and doubted if he should ever find
his maternal relationship acknowledged by so great a man.
During the years 1843 and 1844 Gazonal attended to his lawsuit. This
suit concerned a question as to the current and level of a stream of
water and the necessity of removing a dam, in which dispute