The Balzac Collection - Volume 2: A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798281594127)

At a grand ball in 1809, two men wager on seducing a mysterious young woman. She is, it will emerge, the virtuous wife of a man they both know. Balzac disposes of their confidence in a few pages, with the precision and the economy of a writer who understands that comedy depends entirely on the gap between what people believe about themselves and what they actually are.

In the four works that follow, the same gap opens under higher pressure. Thaddée Paz -- Polish exile, devoted friend, and a man who has loved his friend's wife in silence for years -- constructs an elaborate fiction of a mistress who does not exist, to explain why he cannot love the woman he loves. The fiction holds until it cannot, and Paz's response to its collapse is the completion of the sacrifice he began: he disappears. Albert Savarus publishes a novella that is, for anyone with the key, the thinly encoded story of his own love -- and a twenty-year-old woman in a provincial town, who has fixed on him with the intensity of someone who has never before had an object for her feelings, uses the knowledge to intercept his correspondence, destroy his love, and drive him into a monastery. Marie de Vandenesse, seeking the passion her stable marriage has never provided, becomes entangled with an unstable writer and attempts a secret rescue of his finances that her husband discovers -- and discovers, in her husband's response, something she has been prepared by her entire formation to overlook.

This second volume of the Balzac Collection draws from the Scènes de la vie privée and the Scènes de la vie parisienne to present five works united by a single preoccupation: the social world runs on managed surfaces and concealed interiors, and the moment when the concealment fails -- through misdirected letters, intercepted correspondence, discovered secrets, sacrifices made visible -- is the moment that reveals what is actually there beneath the performance.

Balzac at his most formally varied -- and his most precise about the costs of the lives his society made necessary.