Le Colonel Chabert (novel)

Le Colonel Chabert
Author(s)	Honoré de Balzac
Original title	Le Colonel Chabert
Cover artist	Édouard Toudouze
Country	France
Language	French
Series	La Comédie humaine
Genre(s)	Scènes de la vie privée
Publisher	Mame-Delaunay
Publication date	1829
Preceded by	Le Père Goriot
Followed by	La Messe de l'athée

Le Colonel Chabert (English: Colonel Chabert) is an 1832 novella by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850). It is included in his series of novels (or Roman-fleuve) known as La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), which depicts and parodies French society in the period of the Restoration (1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848). This novella, originally published in Le Constitutionnel, was adapted for six different motion pictures, including two silent films.

Plot summary

The novella opens with clerks in the Paris law office of Derville, an attorney, looking out the window and mocking a determined old man walking through the streets. Le Colonel Chabert is famous for its in medias res opening.

Colonel Chabert marries Rose Chapotel, who was living as a prostitute. Colonel Chabert then becomes a French cavalry officer who is held in high esteem by Napoleon Bonaparte. After being severely wounded, in the Battle of Eylau (1807), Chabert is recorded as dead and is buried with other French casualties. Though he does survive—after extricating himself from his own grave—and is nursed back to health by local peasants, it takes several years for him to recover. After he recovers, he returns to Paris and discovers his "widow" has married the wealthy Count Ferraud. She has also liquidated all of Chabert's belongings. Seeking to regain his name and monies that were wrongly given away as inheritance, he hires Derville, an attorney, to win back his money and his honor. Derville, who also represents the Countess Ferraud, warns Chabert against accepting a settlement bribe from the Countess. In the end, Chabert walks away empty handed from his widow and spends the rest of his days at a hospice.

In Le Colonel Chabert Balzac juxtaposes two world-views: the Napoleonic value-system, founded on honour and military valour; and that of the Restoration. Chabert was not killed at the Battle of Eylau, though it was thought that he was. He struggles back to life but cannot reclaim his identity. His “widow”, who is actually his wife, and who fittingly was a prostitute in her early adult years, is now the Comtesse Ferraud, married (or so it would seem) to an important Restoration nobleman and politician. She repudiates her “former” husband (just as Ferraud, in changed political circumstances, would now be happy to repudiate her). All that matters in the modern era is social rank based upon the possession of money, especially inherited wealth.

This theme of the trenchant purity of the military way of life is something to which Balzac returns in La Rabouilleuse, but there the subject is treated quite differently.

Characters

• Hyacinthe Chabert, Colonel
• Countess Ferraud (formerly Chabert)
• Count Ferraud
• Derville
• Bouchard
• Godeschal
• Desroches
• Simonin
• Boutin
• Chamblin
• Delbecq
• A Notary

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

• Le Colonel Chabert (1994 film)
• Le Colonel Chabert (1943 film)
• Le Colonel Chabert (1911 film)
• Kolonel Chabert (1961 film)
• Oberst Chabert (1914 film)
• Oberst Chabert (1967 film)

See also

• Honoré de Balzac
• La Comédie humaine
• List of characters of La Comédie humaine

External links

• The Human Comedy by Honoré de Balzac hosted by Carnegie Mellon University.
• Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac from Project Gutenberg (English translation by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell), hosted by the University of Pennsylvania
• (French) Le Colonel Chabert, audio version