Theatre-Fiction in 19th Century France: Balzac’s Coralie as the Victim of Post-Napoleonic Meritocracy

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In his Writing in the Wings, Graham Wolf introduces theatre-fiction as a complex intermedial genre focusing on its agents, and “stages, or other performance spaces for dominant settings” (4). The theatre/novel interaction as the core of this study illustrates how Honoré de Balzac engages with this artistic practice to depict the theatre of his time and dramatises the entangled lives of its creators, performers, and sponsors. Balzac’s Lost Illusions introduces the young, naïve, ignorant Coralie not as the main protagonist, but rather as the paramour who unwittingly arouses Lucien Chardon Rubempré -the writer and socialite- to outbrave in the violent storm of post-Napoleonic Paris. The study scrutinises Coralie as a typical victim to see how Balzac reconciles the two interconnected territories of the novel and theatre to document the hostile historical incidents and social interactions when meritocracy had arrived to prevail.