"The child conceived during the marriage has, as a father, the husband" - Napoleonic Code.
Alain Veinstein spoke to Michael Lucey (Du jour au lendemain 10/22) about his book, The Misfit of the Family, which has just been translated into French (Les ratés de famille).
Lucey pored over the Code civil ("an extraordinary literary work") as a prerequisite to his close look at some of the relationships in Balzac's novels, especially those that depicted diversity. "Homosexuality" was not part of the lexicon, and anyway for Balzac the term would define a narrow category for the varieties of interactions that his characters experience. Lucey cites as examples two late novels: Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons, both characters leading single, and therefore suspicious, lives.
