The Balzac Collection - Volume 3: A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798281599146)

Madame de Beauséant retreated to Normandy after Paris had finished with her -- after the man she loved left her for a wealthier marriage and the whole of society attended her final ball knowing what it signified. In her provincial retreat, a young man falls in love with her, and she allows it, knowing what she knows. He eventually leaves to make the marriage his position requires. She does not survive the second time.

These are the coordinates of Balzac's La Comédie humaine at its most searching: private arrangements, irreversible consequences, and the precise measurement of what the social world costs the people it processes.

The five works that accompany it in this third collection move through related territory from different angles. A dying woman spends her last months in a house above the Loire, loving her sons with the absolute clarity of someone who knows exactly how much time remains. A carriage journey ends in a death, and the message to be delivered afterward reveals a life its owner had not fully described. The moneylender Gobseck -- ancient, philosophically rigorous, the master of the universal solvent -- dies surrounded by rotting treasures he could never bring himself to liquidate. An evening of Parisian salon conversation yields a moral dilemma, told in passing, that contains more of Balzac's world than most novels of twice the length. And Paul de Manerville signs a marriage contract whose clauses have been constructed, with great skill and complete ruthlessness, by the mother of the woman he loves -- and discovers, over the years that follow, exactly what he agreed to.

This third volume of the Balzac Collection draws from the Scènes de la vie privée -- the Scenes of Private Life -- to present six works in which the private and the social are not separate territories but the same territory seen from different distances, and in which the consequences of social arrangements are paid, as they always are, in the currency of specific and irreversible human experience.

Balzac at his most precise -- and most unsparing.