Honoré de Balzac's keystone text on dandyism
Honoré de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text
on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Anatomy of Dandyism
(1845) and Charles Baudelaire's "The Dandy" (in The Painter of Modern
Life, 1863), and marking an important shift from the early dandyism of
the British Regency to the intellectual and artistic dandyism of
nineteenth-century France. The Treatise is the first true
philosophical expression of dandyism, and is full of well-crafted
aphorisms: "Elegant living is, in the broad acceptance of the term, the
art of animating repose," runs one classic definition of dandyism, and
"One must have studied at least as far as rhetoric to lead an elegant
life" asserts the importance of verbal pirouette and dexterous quipping
to the dandy. Further embellished with anecdotes and historical and
personal illustrations, Balzac's Treatise even features a fictitious
encounter with the original dandy himself, Beau Brummell. Never before
translated into English, this witty tract makes for an illuminating
cornerstone to Balzac's Human Comedy (which was originally to have
included a never-completed four-part philosophical "Pathology of Social
Life"). Above all, it represents a decisive moment in the history of
dandyism, and an entertaining exposition on the profundities of what
lies deepest within all of us: our appearance.
