Le sentiment va vite en voiture Recueil de nunu balzaciens

This book focuses on some of the words and expressions the 19th-century French writer Balzac, who authored La Comédie Humaine, used, and hypothesizes that the interpretations attributed to them conventionally are not necessarily correct. The book posits that, although Balzac's works have been extensively examined since the late 19th century, the literature, politics, geography, and history of the French language of the time have not been sufficiently explored in detail.
 
To take an example, Le Père Goriot, published in 1835, contains the word idémiste. The word is used to describe Poiret's personality, and is understood through Poiret's words and actions to mean "a person who doesn't have opinions of their own, and always follows what others say." The word has been attributed to Balzac since the late 19th century, cited as a prime example of the author's bad penchant for creating words. Well-known researchers such as Leo Spitzer, the expert scholar of stylistics, Charles Bruneau, a professor at the University of Sorbonne and an authority on the history of the French language, and Pierre-Georges Castex, a professor at the same university and a major authority on 19th-century literary studies, as well as their pupils, have all made the same point.
 
Wondering about the lack of presented evidence, I referred to Walther von Wartburg's Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, which is the first source when researching the history of French vocabulary, and "idémiste" is listed in the fourth volume published in 1951 of this 25-volume dictionary published between 1922 and 2002. We can therefore confirm that the etymology of this word is from the Latin idem, meaning "same," and at the same time, it has been used as an adjective and noun since 1704 in the sense of "people who do not speak their opinions in a discussion, and just say idem." Who, then, of the Balzac researchers and Waldburg, is the accurate source? Verifying the examples, it is clear that the latter is correct. In other words, none of the researchers of Balzac of the second half of the 20th century questioned previous researchers, or consulted the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Knowing that Balzac did not coin this word alters the linguistic outlook about this author.
 
This example demonstrates how researchers can inadvertently become idémiste. We encourage our readers to learn how to supplement the work of their predecessors even as they respect it, taking into consideration other words and expressions covered in this book.
 

(Written by MATSUMURA Takeshi, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2023)