Sign-In
Cart
The Balzac Collection - Volume 1: A New Translation
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 27 2025
Pages: 348
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.87 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Augustine Guillaume marries a romantic painter and loves him with everything her careful, orderly, bourgeois formation has given her. He leaves her for another woman. She dies of it. Balzac places this story first in the Comédie humaine - an announcement, from the opening pages, of what kind of writer he is.
In the five works that follow, the same intelligence examines the same territory from different angles. Émilie de Fontaine, whose pride requires she marry only a nobleman, falls in love with exactly the man her principles demand and, through the application of those principles, loses him before she knows what he is - and ends her story unmarried, having been defeated not by the world's inadequacy but by her own. Hippolyte Schinner, a painter in love with a woman of mysteriously reduced circumstances, learns to see what his suspicion almost prevented him from noticing. Ginevra di Piombo marries the last survivor of the family her father destroyed in a Corsican vendetta, and the vendetta, patient and absolute, consumes everyone it touches. Madame Firmiani, judged by fashionable Paris as a woman living on a young man's infatuation, is discovered by the man sent to expose her to be conducting a life of exceptional and entirely private honor. And Roger de Granville, trapped in a cold legitimate marriage, builds a second family of real warmth and love - and discovers that the social machinery surrounding him has decided, in advance, which family counts.
These six works are drawn from the Scènes de la vie privée - the Scenes of Private Life - the first and most intimate section of Balzac's La Comédie humaine. Together they form the essential introduction to his world: a world in which the private arrangements of daily life are never merely private, in which love and marriage and family are the points at which social structures become most personally felt, and in which the distance between what life promises and what it delivers is measured in specific, irreversible human costs.
An indispensable beginning - and, for the reader who continues, a foundation that every subsequent volume will build upon.
Also from
Ferousse, Liam
Three Short Stories and One Novella (The Onyx Seal, Léa, A Story Without a Name, A Page of History): A New Translation
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules
Paperback
Also in
Fiction Anthologies
On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings
Pirsig, Robert M.
Pirsig, Wendy K.
Hardcover
James Weldon Johnson: Writings (Loa #145): The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man / Along This Way / Essays and Editorials / Selected Poems
Johnson, James Weldon
Hardcover
Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Shelley, Mary
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stoker, Bram
Paperback
Sez I to Myself: The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt
McCourt, Malachy
McCourt, Frank
Hardcover
Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All.
Allen, Mel
Paperback
The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Sophocles
Euripides
Aeschylus
Paperback
Learn Russian with Beginner Stories: Interlinear Russian to English
Gettys, Serafima
Van Den End, Kees
Hyplern, Bermuda Word
Paperback
Obvious Adams -- The Story of a Successful Businessman: New Business Edition
Updegraff, Robert R.
Paperback
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews
Poe, Edgar Allan
Hardcover
Bookin' in the Big House: What I Learned Leading a Women's Prison Book Club
Devoto, Pat Cunningham
Paperback
Japanese Folktales for Language Learners: Bilingual Legends and Fables in Japanese and English (Free Online Audio Recording)
Sato, Anna
Sato, Eriko
Paperback
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, volume 1
Cubas, Cristina Fernández
Pedraza, Pilar
Fager, Anders
Paperback
The Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio (Facsimile Reprint)
Randall, E. O.
Randall, Emilius Oviatt
Paperback