Fiction · 1831
The Hidden Masterpiece
Honoré de Balzac · translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
On a cold December morning in 1612 a poor young man hesitates at a door in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. He is Nicolas Poussin, come to see the painter Porbus, and he arrives at the same moment as an old man named Frenhofer, who looks at Porbus's finished Saint Mary of Egypt and takes it apart in a few sentences — this is drawing, not life; the figure does not breathe. Frenhofer has spent ten years on a single portrait nobody has seen, and will not show it until he has a model perfect enough to prove it. Poussin offers his mistress Gillette, on the condition that he may see the painting.
Honoré de Balzac published Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu in 1831 and revised it afterwards, placing it among the Études philosophiques. It became a founding text for modern painters' arguments about abstraction — Cézanne is said to have identified with Frenhofer, and Picasso took a studio in the Rue des Grands-Augustins. This edition is Katharine Prescott Wormeley's English translation.
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About the author
1799–1850 · Romantic
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) naît à Tours. Après des études de droit, il se lance dans l’imprimerie et l’édition ; ces entreprises échouent et le laissent, dès 1828, endetté de plus de soixante mille francs. Il revient à l’écriture : Les Chouans (1829) est son premier roman publié sous son nom. Il conçoit ensuite La Comédie humaine, un cycle de plus de quatre-vingt-dix romans et nouvelles retraçant la société française de son temps, dont Eugénie Grandet (1833) et Le Père Goriot (1835). Après dix-huit ans de correspondance, il épouse la comtesse polonaise Ewelina Hańska en mars 1850 ; il meurt à Paris cinq mois plus tard.
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