Showing results by author "Honore de Balzac" in All Categories

This novella was first published in French in 1830, with the title “La femme vertueuse” (“The virtuous woman”). In an 1842 edition, the title was changed to “Une double famille” (“A double family”). For Balzac, success in marital relations depended on partners being well matched both in temperament and in social class. In this story, a young lawyer marries a childhood friend, only to discover too late that she has become narrow-mindedly religious. She is described as a “bigot.” (In French, the word specifically suggests religious prudery more than it does in English.) To ...

Two Poets (1837) is the first book in Balzac’s Lost Illusions trilogy, which is part of his sweeping set of novels collectively titled La Comédie Humaine. The story is set in post-Napoleonic France, when the new bourgeoisie was jostling for position alongside the old aristocracy. We meet Lucien Chardon, a young provincial who romantically aspires to be a poet, and his friend David Séchard, who struggles to manage his father’s printing shop and falls in love with Lucien’s sister Ève. The picture of provincial life that emerges is laced with greed, ambition, and duplicity. Balzac’s ...

Voici donc l'histoire de ce père Goriot, vermicellien ayant fait fortune et qui, tel l'Albatros de Baudelaire, se déchirera les entrailles pour élever ses enfants. Mais, malgré le titre du roman, en est-ce vraiment le héros où est-ce Eugène de Rastignac, jeune homme issu d'une noble mais pauvre famille, venu faire des études de droit à Paris et qui va essayer par tous les moyens de se hisser dans l'échelle sociale parisienne ?

Impoverished young aristocrat Eugene de Rastignac is determined to climb the social ladder and impress himself on Parisian high society. While staying at the Maison Vauquer, a boarding house in Paris's rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve, he encounters Jean-Joachim Goriot, a retired vermicelli maker who has spent his entire fortune supporting his two daughters. The boarders strike up a friendship and Goriot learns of Rastignac's feelings for his daughter Delphine. He begins to see Rastignac as the ideal son-in-law, and the perfect substitute for Delphine's domineering husband. But Rastignac has other opportunities too....

Balzac’s novel “The Marriage Contract” (1835) is part of his “Scenes of Private Life,” which is one section of “The Human Comedy,” his great fiction series. A wealthy gentleman wishes to marry a beautiful heiress, whose mother is a Spanish Creole. (In this context, “Creole” refers to a person who is genetically European, but born in a New World colony.) As was common for wealthy families of that time, notaries are hired to negotiate a prenuptial agreement. The details of 19th-century financial arrangements may well seem obscure for modern readers. What remains true throughout...

“The Commission in Lunacy” is a short novel first published in 1836 with the French title “L’interdiction” (i.e., “The Ban” or “The Prohibition”). An aristocratic woman wants the courts to declare her estranged husband mentally incompetent to manage his own affairs. To achieve this, the petition must pass through the hands of an examining judge — a man of old-fashioned integrity and conscience. In this story of Parisian society, we see Balzac developing techniques of rich character portrayal and psychological realism. - Summary by Bruce Pirie

Scenes from a Courtesan's Life is one of the last great works completed by Balzac for his huge novel series entitled The Human Comedy. Sections of this book, in various groupings and with various titles, were published between 1838 and 1847. It eventually settled into the four sections found in the present edition. The French title — Splendeurs et misères des courtesanes — literally, Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans — has also been translated as A Harlot High and Low. The story picks up at the end of Lost Illusions (1843), an earlier novel by Balzac. At the end of that book, Lucien ...

Ève and David (1843) is the final book in Balzac’s Lost Illusions trilogy, which is part of his sweeping set of novels collectively titled La Comédie Humaine. The story is set in post-Napoleonic France. In the first volume of the trilogy (Two Poets, 1837), we meet Lucien Chardon, an aspiring poet frustrated by the pettiness of provincial life. In the second volume (A Distinguished Provincial at Paris, 1839) Lucien, now using the more aristocratic-sounding surname "de Rubempré," leaves his family in order to seek fame and fortune in the literary world of Paris. By the end of that book, he ...

Brothers Philippe and Joseph Bridau are completely unalike: Philippe, braggart and soldier, formerly aide-de-camp to Napoleon, is their mother Agathe's favorite; Joseph, a poor and aspiring artist, is raised in his brother's shadow. When Agathe is reduced to poverty and Philippe accrues gambling debts, the family join forces to focus their attentions on Agathe's brother, Jean-Jacques Rouget, heir to the family fortune. The struggle for his inheritance pits the family against Rouget's beautiful maid Flore ("La Rabouilleuse"), the apple of her master's eye, and her crafty lover.

Life has the capacity of great moments and attainment, of lives well lived, fulfilling for ourselves and for those we touch. But for others life is arduous. There is no spark to ignite the curiosity, to explore and achieve a stability and a growth to their lives. Indeed their lives, in their own eyes, become almost meaningless, their sense of themselves subsumed under a myriad of problems, whether real or imagined. Seismic events in a life might crush them; the loss of a loved one for instance. Coping is difficult, support hard to find and isolation abounds.

Ten vintage dramas on the theme of murder, written by internationally recognised authors and set across the globe ‘Murder is murder, anywhere in the world. The taking of life, the most terrible crime a human being can commit, is the same in any language, whether it springs from vengeance...

This brilliant collection of France’s foremost nineteenth-century novelist and playwright delivers four of his most fascinating works - stories of love, rivalry, horror and adventure - all brought to life by a stellar cast included Stephen Fry and Alex Kingston. A huge influence on many of the most famous writers from Proust to Kerouac to Dickens, Balzac delivers beautifully observed and complex characters with an unsurpassed attention to the details of society at the time, making him an exemplary of realism in European literature.

Lisbeth Fischer has lived in the shadow of her beautiful cousin Adeline for much of her life. Pampered while Lisbeth works in the fields, Adeline makes an enviable leap in status when Baron Hulot offers her his hand in marriage. Out of kindness, they bring Lisbeth to Paris, where she falls in love with the artist Wenceslas, her protege. However, when she is jilted for Adeline's daughter Hortense, her jealousy and rage exponentially intensify, and she resolves to bring the Hulot family to ruin, employing the cold seductress Valerie Marneffe as her vehicle for revenge.

At the beginning of the story the heroine lives an unfulfilled life in rural France, her nature crushed by a domineering and miserly father. Gallant cousin Charles arrives and acts as a catalyst on Eugénie's personality and emotions. Will her love survive the strong self-opinion of the young man and the selfishness of her father or is Eugénie's reward destined to be in heaven?

Inspiré à Balzac par son expérience dans l'imprimerie, Illusions perdues raconte l'échec de Lucien de Rubempré, jeune provincial épris de gloire littéraire. En contrepoint au parcours malheureux de ce "grand homme de province", alternativement héros et antihéros plein de faiblesses, l'histoire évoque les modèles de vertu que sont la famille de Lucien et le "Cénacle", cercle intellectuel de "vrais grands hommes".

One of the greatest of French novelists, Balzac, trained as a lawyer, was a great judge of human nature. In 1833 he conceived the idea of linking together his novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books. This plan eventually led to 90 novels and novellas (including more than 2,000 characters) that he called "The Human Comedy". Balzac's huge and ambitious plan drew a picture of the customs, atmosphere, and habits of the bourgeois France.

In the crowded boardinghouse of Paris, everyone is chasing something—money, love, status, or escape. Among them lives Père Goriot, an aging former pasta maker who has sacrificed everything for his two daughters, women now glittering in high society who barely acknowledge the father who made their lives possible. Watching it all unfold is Eugène de Rastignac, an ambitious young law student determined to rise in a world where success often demands the death of innocence.

The Bette referred to in this magnificent novel's title is Lisbeth Fischer, an excruciatingly cunning poor relation who both depends upon and nurses a terrible grudge against the family of her beautiful cousin, Adeline. That family is slowly being ruined by the uncontrollable sexual appetites of Adeline's husband, Baron Hulot - appetites that will, in time, give Cousin Bette opportunity to exact her vengeance.

C'est le premier portrait de femme profondément destructrice, rancunière et laide que Balzac ait produit. Elle se voit apparentée à un animal malfaisant : "ses sourcils épais réunis par un bouquet, sa face longue et simiesque laissent deviner derrière la paysanne des Vosges un caractère de sauvage". Et c'est bien d'une sauvage dont il s'agit. La cousine est animée d'une rage et d'une passion impuissante. Telle une araignée tissant sa toile, elle gaspille une énergie folle à nuire sans recueillir les fruits de ses intrigues, pourtant patiemment élaborées.

In the brutal Prussian winter of 1807, Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée suffered massive losses to the Russians in the Battle of Eylau. Many thousands died. Young Colonel Chabert falls heroically, his actions having turned the tide of the battle, but he is buried anonymously on the battlefield in a mass grave. Incredibly, he is alive, but severely injured, and digs himself out. On his eventual return to Paris, he finds his wife, the beautiful and ambitious Rosine, now remarried, and his fortune gone.