Power in the City: Balzac’s Flâneur in La Fille aux yeux d’or ELISABETH GERWIN In the French nineteenth century, power was an increasingly urban phenomenon. Famously characterized by Walter Benjamin as the ‘capital’ of the entire century, the city of Paris was setting the stage for articulating modern power dynamics, both for its contemporaries and for those who came after. The terms by which urban forces were being negotiated have been often explored and rehearsed, but perhaps never more vividly than by the self-appointed secretary of his own society, Honoré de Balzac, in L’Histoire des treize. The work as a whole promises to draw the reader in ‘par la senteur parisienne des détails’ and the well-known third volume, La Fille aux yeux d’or, opens by depicting the population of Paris as dominated by false appearances and restless avarice, all driven by the same two elusive objects of desire that echo through the text: ‘or et plaisir’. 1 Balzac identifies gold as the representation of the force that propels humanity; in this, as we shall see, he anticipates by a hundred years Benjamin’s understanding of the capitalist driving force that was reorganizing mid-century Paris, its social map and even its streets and arcades. La Fille aux yeux d’or presents the power of gold as one provoking a frenetic and insatiable desire, a force of chaotic avarice more than one of consolidated agency. However, as is often the case in his texts, Balzac will seek to present not only the common drives of the masses, but also the extraordinary figure who incarnates an exceptional power; and within this nineteenth-century urban landscape, a crucial example is provided by the flâneur. Even while, in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith’s city wanderer experienced a perspicacious ‘sympathy’ 1 Honoré de Balzac, L’Histoire des treize, ed. by Pierre-Georges Castex, ‘Classiques Garnier’ series (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1966), pp. 17 and 383.