The Balzac Collection - Volume 8: A New Translation (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798282584677)

A wealthy provincial spinster has been waiting for a suitable husband for longer than Alençon can remember. Two men compete for her hand: the Chevalier de Valois, old royalist, elegant, impractical, a relic of the ancien régime preserved in provincial amber; and du Bousquier, republican, bourgeois, physically unprepossessing and completely unscrupulous. Their rivalry is a contest between two Frances forced into uneasy cohabitation under the Restoration - and du Bousquier wins.

The d'Esgrignon family are old Norman nobility, proud and genuinely distinguished and entirely irrelevant to the world that has replaced the one that produced them. When young Victurnien is sent to Paris with his father's certainty of superiority and an allowance with no relationship to what Paris costs, the outcome is as inevitable as it is catastrophic. The man who ruins himself trying to save him is Chesnel - the old notary who has served the family across decades with a loyalty that belongs to a vanished world, and who spends everything he has to rescue a family that cannot be rescued.

At the Battle of Eylau in 1807, Colonel Chabert was struck down, stripped by looters, and buried alive in a mass grave. He survived. By the time he returned to France, his wife had remarried, his fortune had been absorbed into her new life, and the legal machinery of his adopted country had processed his death with complete efficiency. The lawyer Derville takes his case. The Comtesse Ferraud - who has rebuilt everything on the premise of her first husband's nonexistence - resists with everything available to her. Chabert, in the end, signs away his own identity rather than continue fighting, and disappears. Derville finds him years later among the inmates of Bicêtre, the poorhouse, still wearing the remnants of a military coat.

This eighth volume of the Balzac Collection brings together The Old Maid, The Cabinet of Antiques, and Colonel Chabert - three works from La Comédie humaine in which identity, social position, and the right to be recognized as who one is are the stakes, and the outcome in each case is determined not by justice but by the indifferent logic of a world that has decided, in advance, who matters.

Precise, unsparing, and - in the case of Colonel Chabert - one of the most devastating things Balzac ever wrote.