Product Description

In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur lives the miser Grandet with his wife and daughter, Eugénie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugénie’s own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. Eugénie Grandet is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac’s Comédie humaine cycle, his magnificent panorama of post-Revolutionary French life, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104889 in Books
• Published on: 2004-12-02
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Balzac was born in 1799, the son of a civil servant. At the age of thirty - heavily in debt and with an unsucessful past behind him - he started work on the first of what were to become a total of ninety novels and short stories that make up The Human Comedy. He died in 1850. M. A. Crawford has translated many of Balzac's novels for the Penguin Classics

Customer Reviews

Saint Eugenie
"Eugenie Grandet" starts off slowly, with a lot of ponderous scene setting and excessive over-description by Balzac. Nothing much happens for quite a while as the characters of the main protagonists are developed by the author. We meet Grandet, the shrewd miser (who would probably be much admired in todays society), his submissive , long suffering wife and their only child, the saintly Eugenie. The main themes in the story are the conflicts between love and money, worldliness and religion, selfishness and altruism , as Eugenie's love for her cousin causes major fissures within the predictable confines of her small family and the rural community in which she lives. Eugenie bears her suffering and loneliness with stoicism and dignity and Balzac's portrait of her becomes a memorable one as the novel reaches its conclusion.

Greatly Entertaining
This is one of Balzac's earlier novels, written the year before Old Goriot (Classics). Unlike most of Balzac's works this is probably the most tightly plotted and restrained of all his books. Balzac has been much admired over the years and this has always been a popular novel. Not just for Balzac fans, this is probably also a good book to start with if you intend to cut your teeth on La Comedie Humaine.

Eugenie Grandet is much admired in the small town of Saumur, nestling in the Loire valley. She is quite attractive and pleasent, also she is the only child of M Grandet, and no one knows how many millions he has secreted away. With two of the local families having an especial interest in marrying off Eugenie within their own relations they are much chagrined when Eugenie falls for her cousin Charles.

Eugenie gives Charles all her money as he sets out to make his fortune, both swearing undying love. When M Grandet finds out what Eugenie has done he banishes her to her room to live on bread and water, thus making his wife ill. Whilst his wife is on her deathbed M Grandet makes up with Eugenie, eventually tricking her out of her mother's inheritance. When M Grandet eventually dies though, Eugenie comes into the Grandet fortune. Now Charles is back in France and has made a fortune of his own will he and Eugenie become married, or have the fates other plans in store?

What really makes this novel so memorable is M Grandet, the avaricious and miserly, but astute and wily businessman. With his affected stammer and selective hearing he is a highly entertaining character, worthy of Dickens at his best.