The Balzac Collection - Volume 4: A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798281897082)

Three women. Three different encounters with the same social world - its marriages, its codes of honor, its promises and its costs.

Julie d'Aiglemont marries at nineteen, in the full romantic ardor of the Napoleonic era, and spends the following decades learning with quiet precision what that decision has cost her. Madame de Merret is forced by her husband to swear, on a crucifix, that there is no one in the closet of her bedroom - and her husband, having extracted the oath, orders the closet walled up. Honorine leaves her privileged life and her devoted husband to live alone in a Paris workshop, making flowers with her own hands, defending a self that belongs to no one but herself.

These are the three works gathered in this fourth volume of the Balzac Collection, drawn from La Comédie humaine - that vast, internally consistent world in which Balzac set out to be, as he said, the secretary of French society, and ended by being its most searching moral anatomist. In each of these narratives, the subject is the same: what the social structures of nineteenth-century France demanded of women, what those demands cost, and what quiet catastrophes accumulated in the private rooms of ordinary life while the world outside remained entirely unaware.

La Femme de trente ans, assembled across a decade from separately written pieces, has the weight of duration rather than the pace of incident - a life rendered in accumulation rather than drama. La Grande Bretèche is one of the coldest and most precisely constructed tales in the language. Honorine ends with a woman who returns to the life she fled and dies of it, which is Balzac's most honest statement about what independence, once genuinely found, cannot survive losing.

Three masterworks - and some of the most unflinching writing about women's lives in the nineteenth century.