Clémence Desmarets – Wikipedia

Clémence Desmarets (or M ^me Jules) is one of the characters in the novel of Ferragus , by Honoré de Balzac. She is the wife of Jules Desmarets for five years (until the death of Clémence), a rich Parisian exchange agent. The Desmarets live in rue Ménars, near the Stock Exchange.

She is also the daughter of Ferragus XXIII (or Gratien-Victor-Jean-Joseph Bourignard) former worker, then building entrepreneur; He was once very rich and pretty boy, companion of the order of Devouring of which he has become the chief. Sentenced to twenty years old from prison in 1806, he escaped and returned to Paris where he saw under various loan names and disguises where he met Ida Gruget.

M ^me Jules, after five years of marriage, experiences the same passion for her husband, “a passion sheltered in marriage”, a love that marriage has not weakened.

Clémence Desmares dedicates to her husband, improving it every day, “her job as a woman” that she practices admirably. For him, for the man she loves since the first glance, she ignores what the words “duty” and “virtue” and feels, she tells him, more married than mother and she is happy not to have a child. The room of M ^me Jules, very refined, a sacred place for the bride and groom that is always lovers, absolutely prohibited for everyone with the exception of the servant, is described with a precision that one can believe interested. In 1833, Balzac was in full romance with M ^me Hańska.

This ideal happiness that unites the two beings and leads them to trust themselves, is suddenly destroyed by the contagious jealousy of Augustus of Maulincour and by his “fatal curiosity”. The baron lives only for the love he has to this already married woman. She dies of sorrow, when her husband suspects a relationship between her and Ferragus XXIII, just as Ida Gruget dies of being rejected. It will be said of Ferragus, but it can be said of the two other texts, that it is a novel that deals with male misogyny because the infinite love that women give to man is vain. An essential misunderstanding comes to destroy this love each time. I’ History of the thirteen reports three tragically missed loves; Whether in marriage or outside, whatever the call of the heart or senses. It seems that in these three novels, the union of the sexes cannot be harmonious.

Indeed, in the novel Ferragus , women die because of the desire to control male characters. They are victims of the curiosity of men, “These hazards that do not arrive twice in a life” But who in fact are not, since they are always spied on and followed by men. At the beginning of the novel, Auguste, as a predator, follows Clémence through the streets of Paris, and in particular to the “Assassine Street” that is rue Soly, where it goes “In a criminally stealthy foot” Hide his father in secret, Ferragus.

Balzac, to fix his reader and attach herself, wants to move him with the violence he describes and the dead she generates. More, he insists on a form of cruelty, and even sadism, in the need that some of his heroes have to make the woman suffer. This woman, whatever she is, is driven out as we chase a game and like him, she is condemned. You just have to see the new, exciting pleasure, felt by Auguste de Maulincour when he begins to continue M ^me Jules through Paris.

The action is located around 1820. Auguste de Maulincour, a young cavalry officer, walking in an ill -famed district of Paris, sees in the distance the young married woman with whom he is secretly in love, contenting herself with . He sees her disappear in a sordid house like all those in the neighborhood. What is the secret of this woman, recognized in the great Parisian world as a model of conjugal virtue? Finding Clémence Desmarets the same evening at Delphine de Nucingen, he tries to tear her secret to her. But the young woman claims that she did not leave her her home from the evening. Auguste then decides to spy on the house where he saw her enter. Succeeding in entering it, he discovers the young woman with a disturbing character: Ferragus.

Auguste before dying poisoned by a toxic capillary solution during a ball reveals to the husband of Clémence, Jules Desmarets, very rich exchange agent, the detail of his discoveries about his wife and Ferragus, who is none other than ‘An old convict. The suspicion then settled in a hitherto admirable household of shared passion. Jules surprises the little lies of his wife who make him suffer terribly and who will lead him to destroy his adored wife. The truth bursts too late because Clémence succumbed to sorrow not to be able to justify herself with her husband, her visits to Ferragus being dictated by her filial love, since the Forçat was his father.