The Balzac Collection - Volume 5: A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798281982931)

Oscar Husson boards a coach from Paris to the Ile-Adam and does what young men of bourgeois aspiration have always done in such situations: he makes claims about himself that the subsequent years will spend considerable energy disproving. The boasts he offers his fellow passengers on that journey will follow him -- through military service, through the various humiliations of a life conducted at the distance between pretension and reality -- until the world has taught him, at the rate it always sets, the difference between the person he claimed to be and the person he was capable of becoming.

In Saumur, Eugénie Grandet has grown up in a house whose atmosphere has been organized, entirely and without her knowledge, around her father's single passion. Père Grandet -- former cooper, revolutionary-era opportunist, accumulator of a fortune whose size even he has lost accurate count of -- does not beat his daughter or refuse her necessities. He simply ensures that every transaction, every relationship, every arrangement of daily life is conducted under the sign of the gold that must not be spent. When her cousin Charles arrives from Paris, sent by a father who had already committed suicide when he set out, Eugénie feels, for the first time, something that her father's house has no category for. She gives Charles everything she has -- her gold, her savings, every coin she has ever been given -- for his passage to the Indies. He goes. He makes his fortune. He marries a noblewoman and sends her a careful letter.

Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, published in 1833, ends with its heroine in possession of her father's enormous fortune, widowed after an indifferent marriage, living still in the house in Saumur, charitable and respected and entirely empty of the life her nature was formed to want. Père Grandet's death -- his hand moving toward the golden crucifix the priest holds before him, the reflex of a lifetime completing itself in the final moment -- is one of the Comédie humaine's great set pieces: a man whose passion organized everything else dying as only that passion could require.

This fifth volume of the Balzac Collection brings together A Start in Life and Eugénie Grandet -- two novels of formation, two educations administered by the same social world at different costs, and two of Balzac's most precisely constructed accounts of what it means to begin a life and discover what the beginning has already determined.