With canonical French writer Honoré de Balzac, I’d suggest starting either where I did, with Old Goriot, or the latest novel of his I’ve read in my annual return to his work, Eugénie Grandet (1834). (Attempting to pronounce that last name the French way has unexpectedly defeated me. Sounds like I’m hacking. So I settle for the anglicized Grandet [Gran-DAY.]) The theme I associate most closely with him—the corrupting power of money—is presented here with typical acidity, in a masterfully plotted novel of beginner-friendly length. It takes place in the French countryside and concerns the Grandet family, whose patriarch is Monsieur Grandet, a wine salesman and miser. Or, as I took to referring to him, a “cheap bastard.” Though he’s accumulated the sort of wealth that’s made him and his family the talk of the region, he jealously guards every last coin, every crumb of food, and every candle in the rundown, cheerless home he shares with wife, daughter, and servant. The novel isn’t satire but, nevertheless, Monsieur Grandet’s ruthless pennypinching, sharp business practices, love of caressing his riches, and generally detestable personality (he refers to himself as a cat and his wife and daughter as the mice) can make the reader wonder. A nephew temporarily staying with the family learns that his father has gone bankrupt and committed suicide. Inconsolable, he shuts himself in his room and refuses dinner. Monsieur Grandet’s first thought: Hey, at least we’ll be saving on dinner. One day Madame Grandet, who’s spent her marriage suffering her husband’s tyranny in silence, takes ill, her skin turning yellow. Monsieur Grandet says he likes the color yellow. However, it isn’t simply an exaggerated portrait. Balzac’s consciously constructed monster of the age contains traces of humanity, meted out at no suspiciously apt moments: watching his daughter brush her hair, making luggage for his nephew, an evanescent doubt or two. And as in other Balzac novels, the monster eventually clashes with someone who isn’t so calculating, doesn’t worship money, an innocent. That innocent is the titular character, the monster’s daughter, Eugénie. She’s been kept ignorant of basic comforts and her mother has been largely cowed into submission, leaving her to appear simple and pure of heart, initially. Yet Balzac is sensitive to each stage of growth that leads to conflict with her father, and more, to maturity in the form of an awareness of how many others in society at large share his attitude toward life. Contradiction that makes for a flesh-and-blood person on the page: fragility revealed by disappointment and sorrow blended with the quiet strength to endure, soul intact.
I must applaud this plot once more. The very word might bring on a foretaste of bored predictions and squandered time: of hokey or overwrought incidents provided at regular intervals because something has to happen, wrapped up neatly (and without reverberation) in the end. The answer, this novel shows, isn’t necessarily indifference or chaos or whatever the day happens to give. Balzac establishes a world and a situation with his representative figure. He all but announces his intent to create a work that’s part social criticism. And at every point I think artificiality is about to peek through, what happens instead follows the logic of the ordinary, events shaped by human weakness and unremarkable developments. Nothing is given short shrift: Balzac retains precision of form as the book moves and pulses.
All this has been to say that I don’t think I can wait another year to read Balzac. This edition of Eugénie Grandet was translated by Marion Ayton Crawford and is part of the Penguin Classics series, the label of which (usually) sets my mind at ease.
