Honoré de Balzac

Le Lys dans la Vallée is an 1835 novel about love and society by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac. It concerns the affection — emotionally vibrant but never consummated — between Felix de Vandenesse and Henriette de Mortsauf. It is part of his series of novels known as La Comédie humaine, which parodies …

The text is that of Burton Raffell’s acclaimed 1994 translation. The text is accompanied by an introduction, textual annotations by the editor, and a map of Paris. "Responses: Contemporaries and Other Novelists" illustrates Balzac’s immense influence on other writers, among them Charles Baudelaire, Hippolyte Taine, …