The only drug that does not kill

In this article I would like to make two recommendations. The first is that you read The Abandoned Woman, by Balzac, which Viena Edicions has published in the collection Petits Plaers, translated by Josep Maria Pinto. The second recommendation is that, if you are one of those who have the habit —like me— of reading with a pencil in hand to underline especially beautiful or interesting phrases or paragraphs, this time you let it go. I let it go when I realized I was underlining practically everything.

On the book flap we find two important pieces of information: that the great Honoré de Balzac drank fifty cups of coffee daily —hence his monumental work— and that The Abandoned Woman, which was published in 1832 in La Revue de Paris, was Balzac's favorite nouvelle of Marcel Proust. From whom could we receive better advice?

I underlined the beginning of the novel with that joy of “let’s start well”: “In 1822, in the early days of spring, the doctors of Paris sent a young man to Lower Normandy who was then suffering from an inflammatory illness caused by some excess of study, or perhaps of life”.

Say you love me even if it's a lieAnna Karenina with the famous phrase: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.

From here, Balzac went on to unravel a story of love, seduction, and social conventions with his boundless narrative talent. The young Gaston arrives in Normandy and learns of the existence of the young and beautiful Madame de Beauséant, who retired to Normandy and lives socially apart, after a “slip”. This awakens young Gaston’s interest because, Balzac says: “We are only ruthless with vulgar things, feelings, and adventures. When we attract looks, we seem great”.

I think by here I had already let go of the yellow and black pencil, admitting that my abusive underlining made no sense. I continued to delight in the love story of Claire and Gaston and only went to look for the pencil again towards the end of the book, when she, in a letter addressed to her lover, writes to him: “Make me suffer, but do not deceive me”.

It was inevitable to remember Montserrat Roig and her novel Digues que m’estimes encara que sigui mentida (1996). In its pages I found a sentence that I have reread and quoted many times: “The only drug that doesn't kill you –even if it makes you sick–, the only ethyl effluvium that doesn't make you lose your senses or damage your liver, the only love that isn't disgusting is good literature”. Surely Mercè Rodoreda and Aloma would agree.

I don't know how Balzac's liver must have been with his fifty coffees a day, but his enormous literary work is good drug for all of us, two centuries later.