Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac (1832)

I am pretty new to Balzac, but two things. He really nails the human condition in each and every tales he tells, and while this is very good, it is not his best. Read some of his novel length works and then, when you have nothing left and still need more, turn to the stories. This falls in between, as more of a novella, but I would have loved to see it fleshed out to a full length book. The colonel is a legendary and long presumed to have fallen hero of Napoleon's rampaging Austrian campaign. He was declared dead after the Eylau, which was a bloody, deadly, and indecisive battle between Napoleon's Grande Armée and the Imperial Russian Army under the command of Levin August von Bennigsen near the town of Preussisch Eylau in East Prussia. He literally clawed his way out of a grave and is now a shattered, diminished, and yet still recognizable figure who returns to Paris to discover the breadth and depth of his wife's betrayal.