Eugénie Grandet: Balzac’s Portrait of Avarice, Love and Solitude in The Human Comedy
Eugénie Grandet, daughter of a greedy, miserly man, falls in love with her cousin Charles, and gives him everything she has to help him face the debts left by his father. She comes to know social ingratitude and family punishment until, on the death of her parents, she becomes a rich heiress. It is a great novel, still very relevant today, that shows how greed and avarice drive our relationships.
Author: Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)
Title: Eugénie Grandet (1833)
Format: English paperback (Pocket Penguins), 240 pages
Series: Part of La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy)
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0241260051 (ASIN 0241260051)
A Faithful Heart
Balzac’s characters are usually consumed by their secrets, with their demons besieging them constantly. The novel is a portrait of avarice and of illusions about power and self-interest. Considered by some to be Balzac’s masterpiece, it is part of his ambitious project, The Human Comedy.
The action centres on the daughter of a rich investor, the beautiful and delicate Eugénie, courted by two great bourgeois families seeking her hand. But she remains faithful to her true love, her cousin Charles. Stifled by social conventions and by her father’s avarice, her submissive temperament rebels for love. Yet the same love that helps her grow up also brings the solitude, monotony and melancholy that frame the barrenness of her life.
Two Great Characters
Within that narrative cathedral that is The Human Comedy, the novel holds a special place for its two great characters: a young woman who discovers love for the first time and gives all she has as a pledge to help her beloved, and her father, old Grandet, the most complete incarnation of the miser since Molière’s play of that title. Paternal love is abolished by Grandet’s avarice: at the last moment of his life, he warns his daughter that she will have to account to him for the inheritance when she reaches the other world.
Saumur and the Cooper’s Gold
The novel is set in Saumur, a sleepy town on the Loire, in a dark, damp house where every candle and lump of sugar is counted. Félix Grandet, a former cooper, made his fortune during the Revolution by buying confiscated church lands cheaply, and he has gone on accumulating vineyards, forests and gold while living like a poor man. Each year on Eugénie’s birthday he gives her a rare gold coin, and the moment when he discovers that she has given her collection away is one of the most terrifying scenes in Balzac. His faithful servant Nanon, devoted to the family despite the miser’s meanness, is another memorable portrait.
Suitors and Speculation
Two local families, the Cruchots and the des Grassins, compete for Eugénie’s hand and fortune, flattering the old man at every opportunity, and Balzac describes their manoeuvres with dry comedy. Meanwhile Grandet handles the bankruptcy of his brother, Charles’s father, with a cunning that shows the miser as a genius of speculation. When Charles leaves for the Indies to make his fortune, what he becomes there, and what he does on his return, is Balzac’s bitterest comment on the age of money.
A Province in The Human Comedy
Balzac placed the novel among his "Scenes of Provincial Life", one of the sections of The Human Comedy, the vast cycle of novels and stories in which he set out to portray French society after the Revolution. Published in 1833, it was one of his first great successes, written at the start of the extraordinarily productive years that also gave us Père Goriot (1835). Balzac wrote at a furious pace, often through the night, driven partly by his own debts, which gives his insight into money and greed a personal edge.
Charles
Beside these two powerful portraits, Charles, the young Parisian raised in luxury and idleness, serves mainly to highlight the realities of everyday life, the strength of Eugénie’s love and the extremes to which avarice can go. Although it belongs to The Human Comedy, Eugénie Grandet stands complete on its own, and it is a good first Balzac for readers new to him.
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