“the depths of the human heart.”
Colonel Chabert is the story of a soldier–a great favourite of Napoleon’s who is left for dead following the battle of Eylau. Chabert literally digs himself out of a mass grave and is nursed slowly back to health. Unfortunately, Chabert’s severe head wound caused permanent memory loss, and it is years before Chabert clearly remembers who he is.
After fragments of his memory return, Chabert contacts his wife–unfortunately, she has remarried and is now the Countess Ferraud, and it is in her best interests that Chabert remain dead and forgotten and that she remain the sole wealthy recipient of the Chabert fortune. So she ignores the letters Chabert sends.
Desperately poor, in bad health, and nursing a growing sense of injustice, Chabert seeks out the services of an ambitious and fascinating young lawyer named Derville. Derville is intrigued with Chabert’s story and decides that Chabert is either the victim of a terrible injustice or “the most accomplished actor” he has ever seen. And so Derville sets out to regain at least a portion of Chabert’s fortune…
Balzac is one of my favourite authors, and I’ve read many of his works. Colonel Chabert is novella length, but it is better described as a sketch of a novel. For anyone trying Balzac for the first time, I recommend starting with either Cousin Bette or The Black Sheep. Colonel Chabert is perhaps not the best Balzac novel to start with as it is certainly not a good example of Balzac’s extraordinary talent, but the novella serves nicely as a later supplement to Balzac’s better novels. I have to say that the film version is actually even better than the novel–and it’s usually the other way around. In the novel, Countess Ferraud is a grasping, selfish, pitiless ambitious woman–in the film, she is portrayed much more sympathetically. Also, the visual media of film allowed much greater scope for such scenes as the dead on the frozen battlefield–this was not conveyed with such power in the novel. Nonetheless, Colonel Chabert follows Balzac’s favourite themes–greed and human motivation.
