The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 3 February 2016
by Honoré de Balzac
We don't usually call anyone a "miser" anymore. Those folks are usually just considered rich, and are admired to one degree or another. You don't really have to be rich to be a miser, actually, just to be overly concerned with your pennies and nickels. But the notion of a miser is deeply ingrained in our cultural history. The most famous, probably, is Ebenezer Scrooge. We don't like misers very much. Great French author Honoré de Balzac seemed to be very much a humanist. He wrote scathing satire that excoriated the excesses of human behavior. In this novel, we meet wine-grower and barrel-maker, Grandet, a man scrupulous to a fault with his money. He constantly complains he hasn't a sou to his name, and yet his one confidante, a notary who wants his son to marry Grandet's daughter, knows that Grandet is worth millions.
Grandet's daughter Eugénie is no great beauty. But there are people in the neighborhood who know of Grandet's wealth. Two young men and their families furiously court Eugénie and the riches she is likely to inherit. Into the mix falls Eugénie's cousin Charles, just down from Paris and newly destitute after his own father fell into bankruptcy. But old Grandet won't have any of this. He clings too hard to his own money to help Charles out of his difficulties. Soon, he is packed off to the East Indies to make for himself a new fortune. But not before he has stolen Eugénie's heart. In his absence, old Grandet grows ever greedier, and rules his household with an ever tighter fist. Eugénie, her mother, and their faithful maid Manon eke out their living from the fragments old Grandet doles out to them after he entertains himself by paring down individual sugar cubes to save more money. His worship of gold, far beyond any spiritual worship, leads him, eventually, to his grave. Eugénie inherits and awaits the long-delayed return of her cousin Charles, for whom she has kept a flame burning. But this is Balzac, after all. And however much he portrays Eugénie's virtue, he is too savvy not to catch on to how the World rewards virtue.
The book is uneven and oddly paced. It opens with long vivid descriptions of the (real) French provincial town of Saumur. Grandet's house is a dark and crumbling dungeon in the shadows of the town's walls. The whole place feels dark and dank. The key action takes place over a few days in the Grandet household. Then, years pass quickly with the pages. There are complicated financial machinations, sly provincial plots for marriage, and one enduring and, for us today, unlikely love. In the modern world, we yearn for Eugénie to take control of her own destiny. But in the early years of the 19th century, virtue and ambition were seen to be almost at odds with one another. Balzac knew that. He punctuates the novel with brilliant commentary on human nature. He lets Eugénie wallow in an impossibly pure love, but he lets us know where that is likely to lead in a mendacious world.
Within the grander arc of The Human Comedy this book, published in 1833, and Ursule Mirouët (1841), form the pair Scenes from Provincial Life.
Also by Balzac: [Cousin Pons] [Cousin Bette] [Ursule Mirouët] [Pére Goriot] [Gobseck]