Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac (1839)

This is just my second Balzac book, but I feel like, between the books and the introductions, that I am starting to get a feel for his sensibilities. This year is the year that I am reading 19th century French classics, and I feel like I am off to a good start. This is part of Balzac's prodigious writings that add up to what he called the Human Comedy. The action here is limited to the four walls of a gloomy stone house in the French village of Saumur, inhabited by the Grandet family: the elderly Monsieur Grandet, his wife Madame Grandet, their only daughter, Eugénie, in her early twenties as the story begins, and their sole servant, Nanon. The story is nominally about the unsanctioned love affair between Eugénie and her cousin Charles, who has been sent to visit his uncle in the country, as, it soon becomes apparent, to get him safely out of the way while his father – Monsieur Grandet’s brother – declares bankruptcy and then proceeds to kill himself, leaving Charles doubly bereft and dishonored. It is really about the corrosive nature of money and the endless pursuit of more of it to the exclusion of happiness. Ebenezer Scroodge, created just a few years later by Dickens, has nothing on Monsieur Grandet, who is one of the most gloriously frugal of all the fictional misers. Clever, adaptive, deeply cunning and immensely avaricious, he struggles to force himself to act decently to his wife, daughter and the truly unique and admirable Nanon, but he is continually undone by his greed. This is a theme Balzac returns to over and over again.