Honoré de Balzac, ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ (1831)
Good Reads meta-data is 28 pages, rated 3.85 by 3,858 litizens.
Genre: Short Story.
Verdict: A gem.
This story is the 71st entry in Balzac’s sequence La Comédie Humaine.
An ingénue befriends a celebrated artist only to realise that this painter profits from the advice, assistance, and creativity of another, much less well-known, but far greater artist. The descriptions of painting and painters are superb, even better than those in Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Way to Paradise (2004) and those are memorable.
It all leads to an ironic denouncement worthy of an O’Henry story. It is all about knowing when to quit, about the perfect being the enemy of the good, about the means becoming the end. Read it for yourself. The story is usually bound with others so that the page numbers are deceptive.
There are more than ninety items in the whole sequence, and Balzac left behind notes for another forty or so pieces. He did think big. I first heard about and read Balzac in high school whereas today the references are to Marvel Comics I am told. Go figure.
When we got our first Rocket E-Books in the 1990s I set out to read La Comédie Humaine in order. Nothing if not ambitious. I got as far as Letters of Two Brides before surrender. Defeat was the result of (1) the terrible formatting of the contemporary public domain texts from Project Gutenberg which did not fit the screen, have line wrap, paragraph breaks, or any of the other formatting we take for granted today and by (2) the sheer boredom of that novel for no doubt the ever penurious Balzac spun it out to get paid by the word, but after some of the rip-snorters that preceded it the result was numbing.