Although it contains much fantasy, Balzac’s information is not all invented and there is some truth in the tales of the Commissioner for Ordnance for Angoulême, Grand-Besançon. He certainly boasted about the upas tree, as Pierre Janin has showed in his Preface, but Balzac had to have contacted other informants, in particular his friend Auguste Borget, the painter, who was preparing for his round-the-world voyage at this time (1831). It was probably Borget who told Balzac about the book quoted, The Story of Lord McCartney’s Voyage, and his publisher, Amherst. This book had been translated into French by J. Castera in 1799. If Balzac had looked into the book he would have seen these words on the subject of the upas tree as described by Foersh. “But what he says about a tree so poisonous that its emanations can kill people miles away is regarded in the country itself like one of Baron Munchausen’s fables.” What a shame that was and how Foersh’s fiction seems so much more attractive.
Balzac may perhaps have discussed this very subject with Charles Nodier who published in the same month of November 1832, in the same Revue de Paris, ‘Le Songe d’Or’ (Dream of Gold), in which is written: “All five of them fell asleep forever in the poisoned shade of the upas tree, whose deadly seeds from the depths of the forests of Java, one breath of your anger has blown here.”
But neither Auguste Borget nor Charles Nodier had been to Java. It must therefore have been Grand-Besançon who gave Balzac the most information. It could be interesting to reconstitute as far as possible what precisely the Commissioner said.
The printed text of Voyage de Paris à Java is not the one originally given in to A. Pichot, the publisher of the Revue de Paris. The latter gentleman, who had been alarmed by a passage in the text, wrote to Balzac on 23 November 1832: “Your absence has forced me into an act of authority which I would not have made without your agreement. I claim no literary authority, but my conscience, stupefied no doubt by prudishness, forced me to suppress two sentences of your description of Javanese women and their prancing around.”
Here is the passage that was removed, much longer than the “
two sentences” to which Pichot refers. It was discovered by a
M. Louvenjoul:
“There, the female genius has developed
further than anywhere else on the globe. There, woman has an
innate suppleness and the concentric movements of the most
graceful reptiles. She can bend, unbend, crouch, roll, unroll,
stand up with the skill of a climbing liana or a convolvulus
plant. She seizes upon love with all the chemical ardour of two
substances of which one can strip the other of its colour and
strength. The body of a Javanese woman seems gifted with
fluidity and the rapid twists and turns we so admire in wild
animals, when they leap up and flee when surprised while
sleeping in a leafy wood. These females flow, sparkle, burst
and as a calm sea reflects the sky, they reflect their
happiness on their faces dewy with the momentary fatigue of
their impassioned eyes.”
Although Balzac was travelling for the whole month of November 1832, he probably did remember his text and thanked Pichot for the cuts on 3 December.
This passage belongs just after: “Well! I found the fulfilment of these crazed dreams in the typical Javanese marriage” (on page 26). This sentence should be followed by “There, the female genius…”.
Grand-Besançon must also have told stories of Javanese and Malay women killing their faithless lovers – they are innumerable.
Eugène Sue, in his Mystères de Paris, takes up the same theme: “Everyone has heard tell of these coloured women, who are so to speak, fatal for European man, of these enchanting vampires who, intoxicating their victim with terrible seductions, drain him of the last drop of blood and his last piece of gold, leaving him as their saying goes, with only tears to drink and his heart to chew on.” And Somerset Maugham again used this theme in 1921 in one of his most famous stories (P&O).
Balzac continues with his description of the Bengal sparrow but he must have confused two of Grand-Besançon’s pieces of information. The Javanese do indeed love the Bengal (the Glatik) – it’s a little blue/grey sparrow with a black-and-white head and a red beak, which lives in the paddy fields to which it brings luck and good harvests. One can see at planting time great flocks of these birds bathing in the smallest puddles. This bird has no song but the Javanese are very partial to the song of one bird, the bulbul (a type of nightingale), which they catch and put in cages that are covered with a black veil because the bird sings above all at dusk. Perhaps the Javanese listening to it, motionless, hear: “the pearly cascade of the piano, the tenderness of strings, the warm sounds of the physharmonica. It is the cantor of real passion.” This extract takes on a particular charm when one reads in the correspondence with the excellent Madame Hanska, the “Dear Eveline” of passages like this: “A thousand good pigeonneries from the Bengal sparrow to his dovecote.”
Balzac makes an allusion to William of Orange and to the Belgian revolution which might appear to be of little relevance to Java; but, on the contrary, Grand-Besançon would have told him of the repercussions these events had in Java. They took place just after the revolt in the island of Prince Diponogero, which degenerated into a real war, the Java War (1825–30). Lost by the Javanese, the war gave rise to a whole literature and plays that dealt cruelly with the Dutch. One play, written by Sultan Hamengkubuwana V in 1830, is called Petruk Becomes King; in it a clown, Petruk, finds himself King by chance and takes as his title “Scourge of the Belgians”. The allusion to William of Orange was clear to everyone in Java at this time. This detail of Balzac’s story allows us to date Grand Besançon’s journey to 1829 and 1830, and when he met Balzac in 1831 his memories would still have been very fresh.
At the beginning of the 19th century in Europe, ‘to run amok’ usually meant a sort of murderous folly, sudden and inexplicable; opium was not generally thought to be the cause of this dreadful impulse. Even so, as early as 1803, Sydney Smith wrote: “We cannot but believe that one day or another, when they are more intoxicated by opium than usual, the Malays will run amok from Cape Comoro to the Caspian.” Balzac is one of the first writers to use the expression in a French text (the Robert dictionary states that the first use of the word in French was in 1832 and it does not appear in the Littré dictionary, but it was used in England in the 15th century).
Tree ferns are numerous in Java particularly in the foothills of volcanoes. They form great clumps which unwind as the plant matures; these clumps are the origin of many Javanese decorative motifs, in particular the tree of life.
When Grand-Besançon told Balzac the stories of men dominating and ordering about animals which respond like humans, he could not fail to be charmed since he was a keen admirer of La Fontaine of whose Fables he had just published an edition illustrated by Deveria. This was a commercial failure but Balzac, listening to the Commissioner, must have thought of the words of La Fontaine, in his Discours à Monsieur le Duc de La Rochefoucauld, which begin the fourteenth Fable of Book Two:
“I have said to myself often, seeing the way
Men act, and how they behave
On a thousand occasions just like animals:
That their king has no fewer faults than his subjects
And that nature has put in every creature
Some grain of a whole that the mind can draw on
I mean mind-bodies, moulded from matter.”
It is in this spirit that Balzac took up Grand-Besançon’s stories, mixing up many things. In these paragraphs appear the foreign words he used. Tomogon must be a poor transliteration of the Javanese Tumenggung, a title bestowed on provincial chiefs; and Toango, the father of the monkeys, must be “Tunku”, which is the equivalent of “ Majesty” in Malay, when addressing a foreign king. This is certainly the case since the father of the monkeys is a Malay and we are in Java. From time immemorial there had been hermits on the island who claimed to have power over animals. But the battle described must have another origin. The good Commissioner must have been telling the Ramayana story. The Javanese version of this Indian epic had been acted out over a long period and one very popular episode tells the story of Bali, king of the monkeys and his rival, Surgiva, whom he had ousted. The latter emerged victorious from the battle thanks to Rama’s intervention. Surgiva, in order to thank him, lends him his army of monkeys commanded by a great white ape, Hanuman. The representation of the battle is acrobatic rather than realistic and the performances of the two monkey chiefs are all leaps, perilous bounds and somersaults. “Tripping one another up, head-butting an old monkey on the leg or a young one in the back standing to get a view of us – I could go on forever if I had to describe it all.”
In the following paragraph Balzac goes on by telling the story of the priest of the crocodiles and there is no doubt that he comes here closest to the story told by his informant. If there are no crocodiles left in Java today, there are still many in Sumatra and other local islands and an Indonesian writer, Sobron Aidit, recounted in 1947 in one of his stories, Crocodiles and their Dukun, the following adventure: a fisherman from Biliton island (south-east of Sumatra) was seriously wounded in the leg by a crocodile. In such a case tradition dictates that its companions meet and agree to ask a dukun (a healer, or magician – Grand-Besançon calls him a “priest”) to capture the guilty one. The story says that the dukun speaks the crocodiles’ language and has a great influence on them. In the story two crocodiles are captured alive and taken to the village where the dukun speaks to one of them. “It is your fault. If you had been good and had not sinned you wouldn’t be here.” The dukun spoke with great gentleness to the crocodile (Balzac repeats this same information) and as he plunges his knife into the animal’s throat, says to it: “ Hush! Keep calm. You are leaving us and promise me you will be well-behaved in the next world and you will sin no more.” Balzac ends his story in the same vein. It is said in Sumatra that when a crocodile has killed a child, the dukun goes to the water’s edge where the incident occurred, and calls out to the crocodiles until a young reptile appears and he tells the parents: “See, your child has come back.” The young beast is captured and given to the parents who raise it like a child, dressing it and adorning it with jewellery. This is still occasionally practised today, half from belief and half for the tourists to whom they will show the clothed animal, for money. As a pseudo-doctor from the neighbourhood says: “We can, today, no longer believe in these customs as I have analysed the blood of crocodiles and it is not human blood.”
Balzac concludes his Journey to Java with an allusion to the shadow puppet theatre where, against “an imaginary sheet pinned up I know not where, with the most fantastical of shadow puppets”. The shadow puppet theatre is still popular in Java.
Grand-Besançon, even if he was taken in by the upas story and – along with many others – by the stories about the sensuality of Javanese woman, was for the most part a respectable source of information. On many points he provided precise information omitted by many travellers: the popularity of the glatik which, even if it doesn’t bathe in the rose’s corolla, does so in the puddles of the paddy fields. The allusions to William of Orange, in 1831, to the tree ferns, and above all to the crocodile priest make us regret he did not take up his pen to write a report that would have been perhaps less seductive, but more factual.
Balzac, nevertheless, quotes La Fontaine’s “Two Pigeons” in a letter (22 July 1825) to the Duchess d’Abrantes:
“I was there; this happened to me
You will think you were there yourself.”
Travellers must, he says, inform their readers. But he let his imagination loose and transformed the best information into fables. He makes his text out to be the description of a reverie. He did the same thing when he described the town of Issoudun in La Rabouilleuse developing the information given by another friend of the Carraud family, Pérémé, or when he describes Paris, modifying his youthful memories. With these modifications he gives us a wider and deeper understanding of these towns than geographers do and perhaps that’s what he wanted to do all along, giving us a better approach to Java; to respond, for example, to the invitation of Theophile Gautier:
“Say, young beauty, where will you go?
To the Pacific Sea? To the Island of Java?”
Jacques Dumarçay