Honoré de Balzac

Finance, fashionable society, and the intrigues of the underworld and the police system form the heart of this powerful novel, which introduces the satanic genius Vautrin, one of the greatest villains in world literature.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the …

The story of a French military hero of the Napoleonic Wars, long assumed to be dead, tries to recover his fortune and former wife through the help of a famous Parisian lawyer. Colonel Chabert, a Napoleonic War hero supposedly killed in the Battle of Eylau, returns to Paris after a long convalescence to find his wife …

Melmoth the Wanderer is an 1820 Gothic novel by Irish playwright, novelist and clergyman Charles Maturin. The novel's titular character is a scholar who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 extra years of life, and searches the world for someone who will take over the pact for him, in a manner reminiscent of …

Balzac is concerned with the choice between ruthless self-gratification and asceticism, dissipation and restraint, in a novel that is powerful in its symbolism and realistic depiction of decadence.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. …

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The Cousin Bette, which was adapted for film or television more than once, is the story of Lisbeth Fischer, or Bette, a pour cousin full of anger and passion who tries to ruin the lives of a few wealthy people in her family. The Cousin Bette is part of Scènes de la vie parisienne, section Les Parents pauvres of the …

Eugénie Grandet is an 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac about miserliness, and how it is bequeathed from the father to the daughter, Eugénie, through her unsatisfying love attachment with her cousin. As is usual with Balzac, all the characters in the novel are fully realized. Balzac conceived his ambitious project, The …

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, …