the Lily in the valley is a novel of Honore de Balzac published in 1836, fitting in the human Comedy , in the section of the Études of manners , in the second book Scènes of the life of province .

Writing mainly with the Castle of Saché in Indre-et-Loire which Balzac strongly took as a starting point, this novel was published for the first two parts ( Two Childhoods and the First Loves ) from November to December 1835 in the Revue of Paris . Then because of a disagreement with the editor François Buloz, the publication was stopped. The book, in its full version, was published in 1836 at Werdet.

Genesis of the novel

The writing of the Lys in the valley spread out over several years. In a first outline of novel, that the author will give up temporarily, Blanche of Mortsauf, (called Henriette by Felix de Vandenesse) appears under the features of Mined, woman devoted to the suffering in 1823. It is this portrait there that it developed and enriched after having read Holy-Beuve Volupté of , which excited the aggressiveness of the literary critic which knew its imperfect novel. the Lily in the valley was presented in the form of a counterpart of Volupté , in better.

Balzac was not deprived of attacks against the novel of Holy-Beuve (sometimes unjust as Maurois indicates it), because even imperfect, and recognized tedious by many current readers, Volupté provides the heart of the Lys in the valley , novel of emotional education which became a literary myth and which other writers réappropriés: Gustave Flaubert for sentimental Education , Marcel Proust, and Andre Gide with the narrow Door .

Synopsis

the Lily in the valley is the history of the intense and platonic love between Felix de Vandenesse, junior by an aristocratic family, and the Countess White-Henriette de Mortsauf, the virtuous wife of the Count de Mortsauf, a dark man and violent one. In this largely autobiographical novel, Balzac transposed its connection with Madam Laure de Berny, going even until borrowing details of the private life of Dilecta : Madam de Morsauf suffers from a cardiac disorder, her children are sick.

Felix de Vandenesse (following the example Balzac) tells his unhappy childhood where it felt badly liked, even haï and its meeting with a “celestial creature” which becomes for him a surrogate mother and an unattainable amante, much purer and intractable that Madam de Berny. After plusieures years of pure relation, Felix meets in Paris, where its activities near the King open the living rooms to him, Lady Dudley, an English aristocrat. The latter makes him discover the carnal joys and passions. Henriette, has suddenly learned their relation and starts to decay, until death.

Madam Laure de Berny had the manuscript in hand a few months before her death. She could read there sentence which were addressed to him: “She not it was liked, but the most liked (...). She became what was Béatrix of the Florenti poet, Laure without spot of the Venetian poet, the mother of the great thoughts, the unknown cause of the resolutions which save, the support of the future (...) She gave me this constancy to Coligny to overcome the winners, to reappear of the defeat, to weary strongest winner (...).

Although the novel was written mainly with the Château of Saché where Honore de Balzac made frequent stays in his/her friend Jean de Margonne, the author of the human Comedy borrowed the name of the property of his friend Zulma Carraud: Frapesle, to locate the history of the Lily .

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