Eugénie Grandet

by Honoré de Balzac

ISBN: 978-0-19-955589-5

192 pages

Publisher: Oxford University Press / http://www.oup.com/worldclassics

Cover illustration: detail from A Girl Seated outside a House, 1867 by Jacob Maris

4/5 Stars

“One of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac’s great Comédie humaine” begins the blurb on the back cover. The characters are well drawn and believable. Small town France at the turn of the eighteenth century. With petty-minded politics, bureaucracy, the conflict between countryside and city, urban versus rural. The great city of Paris is always an escape, a French Eldorado where all business,all finance, all roads must meet.

There are themes of Empire, but the old man Grandet himself has no truck with Empire. He is scrooge himself, measuring out butter and milk in the smallest quantities, whilst being the richest man in the village.

But he is not a villain – his existence has a logic – a terrible logic – that swiftly overcomes a new generation at the end of the book. A a new generation that is again trapped in the human devices French society has constructed.

Unhappiness spreads. No happy ending here. The logic of finance continues, surpassing the frail human ability to withstand its shocks and oppression.

There are parallels with Cold Comfort Farm, written for a different century. There, characters can break free when shown the contradictions in their own reality. Every one of Eugénie Grandet’s relatives are trapped, forever.