The Balzac Collection - Volume 6: A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798282139006)

Louise de Chaulieu and Renée de Maucombe leave their convent school together and write to each other for the rest of their lives. Louise will love passionately, totally, with the absolute intensity that her nature demands -- twice, and the second time fatally. Renée will marry sensibly, discover in duty and motherhood a genuine contentment, and outlive her friend. Balzac's Memoirs of Two Young Married Women conducts this comparison across hundreds of letters with a honesty that refuses to declare a winner: Louise's choice has a grandeur that Renée's does not, and Renée's has a sustainability that Louise's cannot.

In Tours, Abbé Birotteau occupies a comfortable set of rooms in a lodging house and has never done anyone any harm. His landlady Mademoiselle Gamard has destroyed a priest here before, in ways the town has preferred not to examine. His fellow lodger Abbé Troubert is a man of considerable strategic intelligence and considerable political ambition who has been waiting for an opportunity. Birotteau's innocence is not a protection. It is the vulnerability that makes the destruction possible.

In the Loire valley, the great Parisian commercial traveler Félix Gaudissart arrives with his confidence, his pitch, and his subscriptions to Saint-Simonian newspapers. A local man engages him in an extended philosophical conversation, apparently confused about the nature of reality. The entire village knows what is happening. Gaudissart does not.

This sixth volume of the Balzac Collection brings together Memoirs of Two Young Married Women, The Curé of Tours, and The Illustrious Gaudissart -- three works from the Comédie humaine that move across its tonal and formal range from the intimate epistolary to the provincial tragic to the comic, while remaining, in each case, organized around the same Balzacian certainty: that the social world rewards and punishes by its own logic, and that understanding the logic is not the same as being protected by it.