“Adieu” to France’s Dark Past

Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia in 1812 stands as one of the most lethal military campaigns of all time with an estimated one million casualties following the Grand Armée’s five month operation. Eighteen years later the frigid brutality of the invasion was denied the shroud offered by Romanticism in Honoré de Balzac’s “Adieu”, a hauntingly illustrative short story that captures the wartime disorder that annihilated the human spirit of the First French Empire. Through this Realist examination, Balzac uses the narration of a woman’s total loss of perceived social identity as a means to metaphorically grapple with larger cultural questions. Balzac employs historical references and deeply nuanced symbolism in his literary contemplation of how to properly approach France’s profound historical trauma and how to apply the past to the nation’s ambiguous future going deeper into the Long 19th century.

Napoleon Bonaparte saw a meteoric rise to power due to his prodigal military stardom and his effective wielding of Enlightenment ideals. Napoleon was crowned in 1804 in a coronation ceremony where he symbolically opted to wear a Roman wreath in place of the traditional Carolingian crown, officially declaring the formation of the First French Empire. While one would not expect the French to so readily accept a despotic reign under a newly crowned tyrant, public support for Napoleon was nearly unanimous. Following the tumultuous and merciless bloodshed experienced during the period of Revolutionary conflict, the French were desperate for stability and a renewed political order. Napoleon perfectly recognized and fulfilled these needs, and the French people honestly believed that they had entirely triumphed over any negative ramifications of the French Revolution.

The new Emperor saw to the expansion and continuation of previous wars against foreign coalitions where the Grand Armée proved seemingly absolute in their military might. Napoleon swept across continental Europe over the ensuing years gaining territorial and political dominance along the way. The Imperial Empire reached its peak in 1812 as it governed over 130 departments and 44 million subjects. However, this pinnacle of French Imperialism comes to a critical juncture following Tsarist Russia’s repeated violations of the French blockade against Great Britain. Agreement or compromise was unable to be determined, relationships became too strained for diplomatic repair, and Napoleon invaded the Russian mainland in 1812.

The Grand Armée made initial rapid territorial gains owing to the Russian avoidance of a direct confrontation with Napoleon’s forces. Despite French victory in the Battle of Borodino (the bloodiest single day in history up to that point) and the Napoleonic army’s arrival in Moscow, Russian forces continued to escape defeat. Napoleon was then forced to retreat due to rising political unrest back in France and the imposing natural threat posed by the Russian winter. With no other option, Napoleon and the Grand Armée began their ruinous retreat through miles of snow all the while constantly threatened by the looming presence of Polish Cossacks or Russian guerilla troops. In addition, the chaotic scramble was met with an extreme strain on resources due to Russia’s scorched earth strategy of their own territory which culminated in thousands of deaths per day due to will-shattering natural forces. Napoleon’s objective was to lead his way to the Berezina River in Western Russia in order to meet up with Austrian allies.

It is upon the Grand Armée’s arrival at the Berezina Crossing where Honoré de Balzac chronologically begins his narrative in Chapter 2 of “Adieu”. It’s November 29, 1812 and Major Philippe de Sucy is one of those ill-fated men who has survived the retreat as part of the rear guard, finding himself now at the crossing of the Berezina. The majority of the surviving Grand Armée had already crossed and, through some forced divine intervention, they had abandoned their heavy carriages and artillery stockades for the men in the ranks behind. Upon Philippe’s arrival with the rear guard he found that any remaining supplies had been replaced by the bodies of these “heirs to such unlooked-for riches, the unfortunate men, stupid with cold” as they had gone “to sleep, instead of continuing their way and crossing quietly during the night that cruel Beresina” (Balzac). To these fallen soldiers, the prospect of a single moment’s rest and distraction from the soulless trek proved a better option than fleeing the incoming Russian Army.

The soldiers who remain have lost even the most primal of survival instincts, a degradation evident throughout the entire command structure as officers order the bridge and shelters to be burned as a means to force the men across. However, while the sterile Russian tundra had caused even the most heroic soldiers to trifle “away their lives with brutish indifference”, Philippe has persisted with a single shred of hope and determination in saving his love, Countess Stéphanie de Vandières (Balzac). A task he will accomplish only with the aid of his surviving horse, which itself serves as a symbolic last resort of survival as it facilitates an evasion of being trampled during the crossing. Nevertheless, the feral mob soon becomes wise to the presence of a still living source of sustenance, and the mare is imminently butchered, cooked, and consumed with brutal efficiency. A helpless Philippe can only observe such a metaphorical loss of each soldier’s individual identity as they further stray from any conscious control as wartime trauma furthers their resemblance to a carnivorous animal.

The sound of the Russian reveille was soon to interrupt any prolonged apathy of the soldiers as an animalistic hive mind took hold. The bridge was set aflame, and Phillipe observed the spontaneous “flood of men toward the fatal bank [that] was so furious that a mass of humanity poured itself violently into the river like an avalanche” (Balzac). The mere drive to simply escape the situation has proved a final indication of the soldier’s dehumanization as they clamber relentlessly into a frigid demise under the river’s thawed waters. The remaining soldiers managed to find cooperation amidst chaos and set their efforts towards building a raft to carry them across the Berezina. The men, motivated by an “instinct of freedom, strong in all prisoners” made a buoyant vessel and were ready to set sail for the opposite side (Balzac). However, in a stroke of sympathy, Philippe offers his readily available spot to Stephanie’s husband, the Comte de Vandieres. Philippe and Stephanie only have a moment for a departing embrace before she offers a single departing “Adieu!” Following this final exchange, the men aboard the raft forcefully propelled it to the miscalculated safety of the opposite shore. The jolting brunt of their beaching launched the Comte de Vandieres overboard, where “as he fell, a cake of sharp ice caught him, and cut off his head, flinging it to a great distance” (Balzac). Philippe can once again only spectate from across the shore as Stephanie lets out one more “Adieu.”

“Adieu” was one of 91 finished literary works compiled by Balzac into La Comédie humaine, a multi-volume series of his essays, stories, and novels that all have an interconnectedness through their shared theme of analyzing or depicting French society. The 2nd Chapter of “Adieu” could unequivocally stand on its own as an archetypal work of the great history novel thanks to its exhibition of the relentless lethality of war. The omnipresent nature of this lethality is exemplified through Balzac’s rhetorical detailing of the soldiers’ compulsory crossing of the Berezina. Balzac uses this life-or-death stampede to symbolize the final stage of the valiant Grand Armée’s mortal descent into nothing more than a band of apathetic souls trapped inside organic cages of flesh and blood. However, with the perspective of the text being an “Études philosophique”, Balzac’s liberal depiction of the conflict can be analyzed for more than just sorrowful descriptions of lost men.

Therefore, when the Balzacian narrator makes the critical choice to include the gruesome detail of the Comte de Vandières’ decapitation, it is with a direct purpose. At the time of Balzac’s writing of “Adieu” in 1830, the French Revolution remained a looming specter of unease, insecurity, and shame for the French people. Similar to the fall of the Napoleonic Empire from a source of utmost patriotic fervor into an international symbol of war’s true psychological effects, the French Revolution began as a marvel of popular cooperation and republicanism before experiencing a cultural disintegration under Maximilien Robespierre and the Reign of Terror’s flagrant guillotining. It’s evident that Balzac is alluding to the relatively fresh horrors brought on by the Revolution’s turning point and resulting propagation of national paranoia when he makes specific note of the Comte’s decapitation; but why does he decide to bring up Revolutionary allegories in a story originating within the catastrophic turning point of the Napoleonic Wars?

With the knowledge of the decapitation as a metaphor for the larger devolution of the French Revolution, this same historical scope can then be applied to other integral aspects of the story. For one, the very crossing of the Berezina is far more than exclusively the symbolic final metamorphic stage of the Imperial army’s transition from honor to repulsion; through a contextual lens, the crossing’s symbolism takes true form through a broader connection between past and present. As such, the burning of the bridge under French orders indicates that there has been a definite point of no return established within the abominable withdrawal from Russia. One either picked his will and humanity up and found the way to the opposite embankment of the immediate present, or they inevitably surrendered to the moral void and accepted an imminent death or capture by remaining in the past.

The final imagery offered by the Balzacian narrator placed Philippe in the past while Stephanie had managed to make landfall on the opposite embankment before they both were a witness to the beheading.Through this parallel yet discordant experience, Stephanie and Philippe come to both symbolize contemporary French society through perspectives that are ultimately incompatible. As Stephanie did successfully cross the treacherous currents of the Berezina, she has become symbolic of the French historical trauma that has found its way into the present French disposition. She is additionally tasked with the unavoidable burden of cynical 19th century expectations of femininity, which reinforced the appearance of delicacy, fragility, and innocence. Such restrictive gender norms symbolize the egotistical nature of French society's forceful expectations of romanticizing their cultural progression while disregarding the looming historical trauma.

Philippe then serves as the opposing, masculine symbolism of the narcissistic, maniacal aspects of French society. The parts of French society who refuse to move from the past to an ideological present as they still impose such romantic expectations and idyllic view of French culture onto the incompatible reality of France’s radical historical past. In the very same metaphorical manner, he will be observed forcing feminine archetypes onto a later Stephanie who is not capable of meeting any such expectations due to the drastic extent of her trauma. Therefore, Stephanie, as a symbol of historic trauma, is entirely out of the scope of society’s expectations as they strive to disregard France’s traumatic history. Thus, we now move back literally within the text, but forward chronologically in analyzing the first chapter of “Adieu”. Chapter 1 takes place in 1819, seven years after the events at the crossing, establishing a definite temporal discontinuity in the flow of literary time, but also allowing the necessary details and evidence to support Philippe and Stephanie’s symbolic yin-yang.

The chapter begins in media res as the narrator describes a promoted Colonel Philippe de Sucy and his closest confidante the Marquis D’Albon in the midst of a hunting trip. Typical friendly banter is raddled back and forth between the two before the Marquis D’Albon takes a more personal jab at Philippe and his experience of capture and imprisonment in Siberia following the harrowing scenes at Berezina. D’Albon retorts, “but, Philippe, have you forgotten your French? Or have you left your wits in Siberia?” To which Philippe responds, “‘France! such are thy deputies! …Ah! my poor d’Albon, if you had been like me six years in the wilds of Siberia—’ He said no more, but he raised his eyes to heaven as if that anguish were between himself and God” (Balzac). The rhetorical question posed jokingly by the marquis plainly serves as a broader societal question of how to acknowledge Napoleon’s surviving soldiers as they bring their “uncivilized” trauma back to the “civilized” homeland. This question gains further credence as it’s evident that Philippe’s jovial manner and ability to act the part of a perfect societal participant has been visibly marred by an internal inability to comprehend and justify his treatment over the past six years.

The marquis and the colonel, by pure happenstance, then stumble upon a dilapidated monastery, where a “wild” woman soon appears and Philippe is struck by an unconscious force that compels him to lay on the ground as if he were dead. Fearing an actual case of a spontaneous injury, Marquis D’Albon fires his gun in the air and calls for help. “At the sound of the shot, the unknown woman, who had hitherto stood motionless, fled away with the rapidity of an arrow, uttering cries of fear like a wounded animal, and running hither and thither about the meadow with every sign of the greatest terror” (Balzac). The narrator’s continuous comparison of an unidentified Stephanie to a defeminized animal is seemingly rebutted by the evidence of her use of some forms of learned cognition. The portrayal of Stephanie as having lost an identity only stems from a masculine inability to see a woman as anything other than their feminine expectation. This insecurity and unfulfilled expectations are the root for Philippe’s later condemnation of her as animalistic and “mad”. After eventually learning of the woman’s identity as being his estranged Stephanie, Philippe goes into a shock induced catatonia and is brought to the local doctor. While at the doctor’s office, Balzacian themes of interconnectedness strike the narrative again as D’Albon discovers the very doctor treating Philippe to also be the uncle and primary caretaker of the societally removed Comtesse.

Chapter 3 begins with the uncle’s conclusion of the extensive biography as he tells of Stephanie’s tragic experience following her violent separation from Philippe. The uncle anecdotally narrates “she was dragged about for two years at the heels of the army, the plaything of a crowd of wretches … she had no care, no food but what she could pick up; sometimes kept in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal” (Balzac). It is now clear that simply surviving the crossing and being able to move into the present was never a mystical source of ultimate relief like the exhausted soldiers helplessly believed, but rather it led to a nightmarish sequence that directly incited the anamorphism of the bewildered Comtesse. If you treat an individual like an animal for long enough, they will start to act like an animal.

Her degrading journey began in earnest when her husband took the metaphorical place of those guillotined victims during the Reign of Terror and it did not come to an end when she eventually returned home. Such a repulsive experience reveals the reasoning behind a previous scene in Chapter 1 where her uncle showed the marquis “a room on the lower floor where everything bore the marks of capricious destruction. The silken curtains beside the windows were torn, while those of muslin remained intact” (Balzac). First off, the very fact that the textile terrorism occurs within her current home in France shows the vital element of a historic trauma. It is a trauma that the men could not abandon next to their artillery and temporary shelters at the Berezina, and no French civilian could leave their trauma beside the guillotine after spectating a public execution during the Revolution. Trauma is confusingly adhesive and always stalks the afflicted as they return to seek familiarity back home. It is a sickness that will make itself known and will eventually refuse to be ignored, and by tearing her uncle’s curtains, Stephanie attempts to get his attention and help in seeking answers that she cannot produce herself.

Secondly, she destroys the curtains due to an impulse that ties back to the tearing of her clothes while at the sexually abusive whim of the Grand Armée, which she now mimics out by the tearing of fabric. The miming of such intimate violations of her sanctity are acted out as a reenactment of the physical and psychic tearing that led to her madness as the fabric represents both the fabric of her clothes and the fabric of her being that was obliterated by the abuse; by tearing apart the metaphorical fiber of her being she does not avoid the lasting madness, but instead she gives it clarity and puts herself in control over it. In addition, by making such a physically destructive display in her uncle’s French home, Stephanie is then forcing those who are inside the metaphorical French homeland to acknowledge the unjust catastrophe before them.

Lastly, she chooses only to destroy the harder silk curtains whilst leaving the softer muslin curtains intact. This is motivated out of her societal experience of becoming nonconsensually burdened with the masculine idea of a woman. Such expectations seem inconsequential when contrasted against the contemporary lack of morality shown by the masculine power dynamic. The masculine archetype is ignorantly self-assured in enforcing such expectations of females while also having no qualms in then sexually violating those expectations. Such is the hypocritical nature of French society as they want to alter their troubled past into something more pleasant and socially palatable while also denying any form of responsibility or acknowledgement for the morally dubious realities of the past. In short, they want to have their cake and eat it too.

It’s now obvious that Balzac is deliberately delineating trends that he himself has observed in the communal French shame following the Revolutionary and Imperial periods. In the case of Stephanie, despite the horrors she has had to endure while tackling the increased pressure of a feminine mold, she nonetheless managed to cross between past and present. However, she is only in the present through the perception of others as she exemplifies a past malignance that present society refuses to acknowledge or register but is aware still looms. Madness is often characterized by an inability to accept the past, but the linguistic scarlet letter of “madness” has only been bestowed upon Stephanie by external opinions that she fails to meet the preconception of others. She is no doubt the victim of compulsions and psychic damage, but there is no evidence to claim she is not perceptually in the present in her own individual way.

Phillipe sees her current nonverbal state as a complete defeminization and loss of identity because his own concept of identity has been rooted in a self-constructed, idyllic version of Stephanie. French history is genuine in its suffering of a series of extreme hardships and violent moral offenses, which naturally produced a historical trauma for French society. Stephanie echoes this outcome through her anamorphism as it is merely a reflection of her experience. Philippe is then the opposing masculine force as he considers the feminine to be a mirror of his strengths, and since that mirror reflects a perceived beastly image instead of his fantasy, he is only further inflicted with a mental agony and debased from reality. In symbolic context, this is seen as various aristocrats still attached to the Ancien Régime taint the present status of France as they remain in a rejection of an unchangeable history.

Once Philippe rises from his onset of shock, he is readily confident and willing in his ability to completely reverse the effects that he sees in Stephanie, as this will be the way to make everything right! Except, this confidence is a facade for narcissistic delusion. He declared to his friend “I am going to the Bons-Hommes, to see her, speak to her, cure her. She is free. Well, happiness will smile upon us—or Providence is not in this world. Think you that that poor woman could hear my voice and not recover reason” (Balzac)? The Marquis D’Albon voices his doubts with Philippe’s attempts at a cure as he claims “‘She has already seen you and not recognized you’ … for he felt the danger of Philippe’s excited hopes, and tried to cast a salutary doubt upon them” (Balzac). Nevertheless, Phillipe is blinded by his necessity to gain mental peace and he heads to futilely discover reason or balance.

He finds himself in the company of one Monsieur Fanjat, a man experienced with Philippe’s uniquely distraught position with his own Genevieve. He instructs Philippe that Stephanie can only ever be tamed, not controlled in the way Philippe’s disoriented masculinity desires. Philippe’s denial does not waver and when advised by Monsieur Fanjat to attempt to give her sugar cubes, he markedly responds that “when she was a woman … she had no taste for sweet things.” He follows the advice regardless and “when the colonel showed her the lump of sugar … she again uttered her little wild cry, and sprang toward him; then she stopped, struggling against the instinctive fear he caused her.” Such imaginative portrayals by Balzac depict a behavioral pattern similar to that of an animal, but also a definite meaning and purpose behind each of her movements. She has only lost a social identity in terms of acceptance, but she has not lost her own identity as it exists as a mold of the past. Nevertheless, Philippe’s denial of her womanhood is just further credence to the extreme conflict spurred by differing truths of an unchangeable identity.

Deeper in his delusion, Philippe’s “soul, often lacerated, could not harden itself to the sight of Stephanie’s insanity; but he … found some assuaging of his sorrow. He had the courage to slowly tame the countess” (Balzac). Instead of a reevaluation of his inherently divisive preconceptions, he follows the incredulously fruitless task of symbolically changing a past which has already occurred. However, Philippe believes his dedication has paid off when he’s informed that Stephanie reportedly let slip a “Philippe” in her sleep. Nevermind the fact that a broken clock is right twice a day, Philippe takes this as absolute veracity in his efforts and that increased intensity could warrant a reflection in the mirror of Stephanie that correctly matches his romantic perspective.

His new scheme strays far and away from the menial process of Pavlovian conditioning with sugar cubes, Philippe buries deeper into his deceptive surroundings and begins on his own exact recreation of the last scene he considered her to be Stephanie – the Berezina. In the end, “this false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of his army comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once. Monsieur de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic imitation, which was talked of in several Parisian circles as a proof of insanity” (Balzac). Philippe’s dedication to “love” is so evidently overshadowed by the palpable irony produced by his exact recreation of a past scene that he himself has failed to accept the reality of.

Chapter 3 was dubbed “The Cure” by Balzac in a purposeful display of how linguistics can be unrelated to epistemology. Philippe believes that by deeming her “mad”, he is then diagnosing her with a medical illness of which she can then be “cured.” He eventually set this intricately egocentric replica to work and brought Stephanie in on the exact carriage she and the Comte had taken into the Berezina. When the positioning was perceptually perfect, he fired off a cannon and signaled the chaotic outbreak of hundreds of costumed peasants to create the same chaotic flurry. The Countess found herself at the foot of Colonel de Sucy where “she threw herself into the trembling arms that the colonel held out to her, and … suddenly her tears stopped, she stiffened as though the lightning had touched her, and said in a feeble voice,— ‘Adieu, Philippe; I love thee, adieu’” (Balzac)!

As soon as this shred of lucidity was pushed forward into consciousness, the colonel was left with no time for proper indulgence as she immediately passed away in his arms. The Balzacian narrator takes care in effusively observing “Stephanie, on whom death was placing that resplendent beauty, that fugitive halo, which is, perhaps, a pledge of the glorious future” (Balzac). By superimposing a social identity and a desire that is alien to Stephanie’s own, Philippe has ultimately killed and abolished that romantic fantasy that could never truly be. Philippe saw her as no more than a feminine subject, a mirror that should only ever reflect his masculinity and strength. In addition, Stephanie was asleep for the majority of the actual real encounter at the Berezina, and this recreation only exists as the past perception of Philippe and not Stephanie. Philippe never stood a remote chance of being able to cross the Berezina with her in the present and right a past that he deems wrong, because the bridge, the point of no return, had already burned away. However, Stephanie did briefly fit into Philippe's misled idealism through indications of an active theory of mind; but, if Stephanie is symbolic of a historic trauma that presently afflicts a nearsighted French society, then her death only confirms a temporal law where the past cannot be amended by a false present, nor can it be intersected with a past that was never perceived.

Philippe’s fantastical vision of Stephanie and of the past could never make it to the present, because Stephanie symbolizes a societal reality where the bridge to the present failed to be properly crossed and survived due to a lack of any realization or true efforts to amend the French cultural record going into the present. This was simply unrecognizable to Phillipe’s reality as he continuously attempted to place his feminine framework onto an individual who no longer had a concept of social constructs altogether. Thus, he is left within a limbo dominated by an unforgiving historical trauma that he will forever be incapable of fully amending. Philippe is unable to even live in the present as his past is fundamentally flawed due to his adherence to embracing only a romanticized version of it, leaving him with no mental capacity to ever consider the future. As always, the past stays in the past only when it has been done justice by the present.

The depersonalized colonel continued on living only in a biological sense, but this was just long enough to have one more encounter spurred by a random comment on his “equitable nature” by a passing woman. A conversation ensues where the woman then observationally asks “Why don’t you marry? … You are rich, titled, and of ancient lineage; you have talents, and a great future before you; all things smile upon you” (Balzac). This last social exchange existed as the last of the esteemed baron and military colonel’s life, as he finally surrendered to his debilitating mental dissonance and committed suicide. This exchange stands strikingly alone in the novel as being auspicious and “normal.” The woman takes on that delicate feminine mold and through it she strikes an acknowledgement of a returned conventionality and sense of social stability going forwards. To her, the recent past has never been accepted and she is now affected by a maddening circumstance where the past intersects the present. Her refusal to accept the past Revolutionary and Napoleonic traumas spurs her to revert to an even older, hierarchical past of the Ancien Régime, where one’s family name and title defined their worth. In this way, she talks of Philippe’s prospects as being “great” in an indication that the temporal present only continues as an even further past.

Altogether, how does the symbolic duality between Philippe and Stephanie truthfully exist as it applies to historic trauma and the cultural condition of France in the early 19th century? To begin, the monstrous corruption brought on by a maniacal Robespierre was one that deceived and backstabbed the whole populace as they had trusted him to unfetter them from the hierarchical Ancien Régime. The French had no period of security or stability throughout the various weak and ineffective governments that were additionally spawned out of the Revolution. Furthermore, following his meteoric rise to power, Napoleon embodied Voltaire's idea of the “enlightened despot” and made truthful promises to not restore the Ancien Régime like many feared. Yet, he only served as another stab in the back of the French spirit. He made nationalist promises of a renewed honor and international recognition of an Imperial France, but his insatiable ambition led to the decimation of this reality. His reign ended with a belittled France flung to the mercy of retributive and equally greedy European powers.

Balzac uses the story of “Adieu” as a tool in which to critique the French zeitgeist, or lack thereof, following the cataclysmic social, cultural, and governmental failures experienced over the last 30-40 years. Philippe represents stubborn France, a nation whose narcissism refuses to accept the wounded respect and status, in comparison to the military grandeur and stately valor of the past, brought about by such deplorable events. The France represented by Philippe may try to use Romanticism in culture and obstinate propagation of a false idyllic reality, but this fantasy France can simply never come into fruition as the present only exists through the acceptance and growth from such arduous periods. Denial will be instilled in reaction to this differing reality, for Philippe this came in the form of regarding Stephanie as a benign animal with a loss of a social identity, but denial does not unburn the connection between past and present.

On the other hand, Stephanie represents that of which Philippe is stubborn and ultimately unwilling to accept: violent historical trauma. This lack of acceptance makes its mental strain apparent. France became beastly and animalistic in their territorial acquisitions and colonization of those deemed lesser, and it is of no surprise then that these traits make themselves apparent in the present as France works through such a trivial recent past. The present only exists due to a unanimous past, anything outside this, whether it be an individual or a nation, will inevitably become crippled and disappear – in the same way cancer is surgically cut out of an otherwise healthy person. Stephanie was forced to deny her truths and she collapsed instantaneously. Philippe lost his one hope at rectifying his fundamentally flawed and unaccepted history, and he soon committed suicide. Balzac has made it clear in his writing that a nation can only continue and prosper once it has come to accept and learn from a potentially traumatic past.

At the time “Adieu” was written in 1830, the formerly deposed House of Bourbon had long been restored to the throne under a perceived hope of maintaining a long-term European peace. However, the “Restoration” merely saw a conservative regime that was quick to reintegrate the social systems of the Ancien Régime. This repression backsliding into the monarchical France of the past was still met with dissent and populist ideology similar to that used in the French Revolution. For the Bourbons, they tried to hide the past by amending the present through repression of free speech, which predictably proved disastrous. Thus, Balzac writes “Adieu” as both a hopeful way to say “Adieu” to France’s dark past and also as a cautionary tale for how the French should approach and react to future changes in power dynamics. Nostalgia leaves one drowning in the confusion of the present, and to force another into a belief that is not their own will similarly prove catastrophic. Honoré de Balzac wants his compatriots to look to the present by forcing a reanalysis of the past, only then France can go into the future.