James held court in Talleyrand’s old mansion in Paris, where his dinners were cooked by Carême, a chef de bouche, philosopher of haute cuisine who had served Talleyrand, Alexander I and George IV. The banker was able to celebrate wins by his racehorses with his own Lafitte wines. Witty, caustic and vigilant, he was happily married to Betty, his beautiful Viennese niece, who had her five children taught piano by Chopin and held an almost royal salon, herself friends with Queen Marie Amélie. When his brother Nathan died in 1836, James became the leader of the family. He still spoke French with a heavy German accent and when his London niece married out of the faith, he insisted she be ostracized. Yet he personified a new interconnected capitalist world. At his salon he entertained not only princes but also Honoré de Balzac, the rambunctious novelist who observed characters, high and low, surviving in the new realm of industry and money. Balzac’s father had made it from peasant boy to royal secretary, then became a revolutionary organizer and idiosyncratic essayist, only at fifty-three marrying a beautiful, well-off shopkeeper’s daughter who became Balzac’s mother.
After an internship in a law firm,* Balzac embarked on a quixotic pursuit of fortune in multiple fields, from publishing to Sardinian slagheaps and Ukrainian forestry, unable to resist a ‘bonne speculation’.
His first bestseller, Eugénie Grandet, portrayed a daughter overshadowed by the avarice of her rich farmer father; then in Père Goriot he introduced Rastignac, a young provincial making it in a turbulent Paris: ‘the streets of Paris possess human qualities’. Paris was always a character – ‘the city of a hundred thousand novels, the head of the world’.
Balzac’s novels, ‘faits pour tout le monde’, written for everyone and about everyone, made him, like Dumas, vast sums. He lived as he thought a Parisian writer should live, enjoying love affairs with duchesses and courtesans, writing all night, overweight, breathless, gradually poisoning himself on overdoses of coffee (a warning to all writers). But he was also a romantic, falling in love with a Polish countess whom he knew only through letters signed L’Étrangère.
Balzac accepted loans from James de Rothschild, but he perhaps resented the banker’s power, repaying his help with his character baron de Nucingen who bore resemblances to James. ‘The secret of all great fortunes, when there is no obvious explanation for them,’ wrote Balzac in his Le Père Goriot, defining a rule of modern capitalism, ‘is always some forgotten crime … forgotten because it’s been properly handled.’ Balzac was fascinated by all of society, analysed in his realistic novels, which he called ‘Études des Moeurs’, ‘that no longer believes in anything but money’. But it was through family that this indefatigable dynamo followed the threads.
After Paris, revolution spread to Habsburg Italy, Romanov Poland, the Netherlands and, in April 1831, Braganza Brazil. In 1824 Emperor Pedro had been granted a prerogrative – the Moderating Power – to oversee an assembly elected by a broad suffrage of white males in a hybrid constitution. Soon afterwards, in December 1825, his ill-treated Habsburg empress Leopoldina gave birth to a son, Pedro, duke of Braganza, but Pedro also flaunted his devotion to Domitila, now raised to marquess of Santos, who had herself just given birth to a daughter, Isabel, recognized by the emperor as duchess of Goiás.
Wildly in love with Domitila, he imposed his paramour on his depressed wife who, now hating ‘dreadful America’, wrote to her sister Marie Louise about the ‘barbarous’ Pedro: ‘He’s just given me proof of his negligence to me, mistreating me in the presence of the person who is the cause of all my afflictions.’ She was pregnant again. In December 1826, while her husband was away fighting a southern rebellion, Leopoldina miscarried; weakened by emetics and laxatives, she died. Pedro was horrified by his own behaviour, haunted by her ghost. He even jumped out of the bed he shared with Domitila: ‘Get off of me! I know I live an unworthy life. The thought of the empress doesn’t leave me.’ He sobbed over his son Pedro: ‘Poor boy, you are the most unhappy prince in the world.’ He decided to remarry.
