The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 6 October 2014
by Honoré de Balzac
The best way to get rich is to be born rich. A second method is to inherit money from a relative, no matter how distant. Beautiful and pure as the driven snow, young Ursule is the daughter of an illegitimate son, living as the ward of her great uncle Dr. Denis Minoret. The good doctor is an atheist, a believer in the mythical spiritual powers of magnetism, and is quite rich, having accumulated his wealth by treating notable characters in Paris. He takes his ward into retirement in the provincial town of Nemours, where his numerous potential heirs (all neices and nephews) wait impatiently for his death, so that they can divide up what they think is to be a million-franc fortune. And they suspect that the virtuous and pious young beauty, Ursule, is not what she seems, but is rather a scheming thief of the moneys they see as already theirs. Ursule does contrive to convert her uncle to the church, after he has an unlikely spiritual vision of her quietly praying for his soul. Now the heirs are convinced he'll leave all his money to the church. Minoret is not blind to these greedy relations, and not blind to the way young Ursule is likely to be treated when he does finally die. She is too young to contract a marriage or own property outright. He needs to find a way to protect her fortune.
Balzac presents a broad portrait of bureaucratic France in the turbulent early decades of the 19th century. There are numerous petty officials and civil servants of varying degrees of honesty. A middle class character must make his way into civil service, the military, or the government. It seems the French do love a bureaucracy. Minoret contrives a complicated scheme to protect Ursule. His heirs contrive even more complicated schemes to wrest her inheritance from her. And through it all, she remains honest and pure to a fault. She will not fight for what is legally hers, and is virtuously resigned to be happy only to sacrifice her heart to the one man she has ever loved (via furtive glances across a suburban street). It doesn't look likely to end well, and the reader senses a growing unease at how virtue is treated in a base world. Balzac struggled with Ursule's character, after all, finding it easier to draw flawed and mendacious characters than to draw one entirely without fault. Her beauty and virtue, of course, stretch credibility in a cynical world. But, there she is, immersed in a world Balzac usually views with a jaundiced eye. It is a sharp, often witty work, and, as always, a novel full of well-drawn and peculiar characters. This book, published in 1841, forms a pair within the Human Comedy, with Eugénie Grandet, titled Scenes from Provincial Life, and features characters seen in others of his novels.
Also by Balzac: [Cousin Pons] [Cousin Bette] [Eugénie Grandet] [Pére Goriot] [Gobseck]