Eugéine Gandet by Honoré de Balzac
French fiction
Origninal title – Eugéine Grandet
Translator – Slyvia Raphael
Source – Personal copy
In my first book of the year, I covered a relationship between cousins, and this is my second book of 2025. Another French book has that in part of one of the storylines; this was rewritten by Blazac after he wrote the original version so it would fit in with his grand plan of Human comedy. This fits in part about rural life and is set in a small village in the Loire near the town where Balzac grew up as a young man. So, for me, some of the characters may have been based on people he knew in that village when he was growing up.
In certain provincial towns, there are houses whose appearance arouses a melancholy as great as that of the gloomiest cloisters, the most desolate moorland, or the saddest ruins.There is, perhaps, in these houses, a combination of the silence of the cloister, the desolation of moorlands and the sepulchral gloom of ruins. In them life is so still and uneventful that a stranger would think them uninhabited, if his eye did not suddenly meet the pale, cold look of a motionless figure whose almost monk-like face appears above the window-ledge at the sound of an unknown step. These melancholy characteristics are to be found in the appearance of a house in Saumur, at the end of the steep street which leads to the château through the upper part of the town. This street, not much used nowadays, is hot in summer, cold in winter, and dark in parts; it is noteworthy for the resonance of its little cobbled roadway, which is always clean and dry, for the narrowness of its winding path, and for the peace of its houses that are part of the old town and are dominated by the ramparts.Dwellings there, three hundred years old, though built of wood, are still sound, and their varied exteriors contribute to the unusual appearance which commends this part of Saumur to the attention of antiquaries and artist
The opening of the book
The book focuses on the Grandet Family, who in the small town of Saumur, have become very wealthy. Still, the head of the household, Felix, is almost a Scrooge-like figure, a man who has, over the years, built up wealth from his wife’s estate. To start with, he married her. She was the daughter of a timber owner. Over the years, Felix built up the funds the family hands. But as he has done this, he has become cut off from everyone around him. So yes, he has money, but he only allows six people into his home. He has a daughter, Eugenie. She has many men in the village who want to take her hand, but Felix makes the house live on only a few francs a week as he gets tenants to pay him with produce. Enter to this is the dashing Charles, a cousin from Paris. When Eugenie gives him some gold coins, Felix overreacts and locks her up and sets out to get money from Charles. Along the way, Felix is told that Eugenie should inherit his wife’s money if anything happens to her. She and Charles stay connected after Felix strips him of money. We see how she becomes a woman wanted to be married by many men when she finally has her money.
Only six of the townsfolk had the right of entry into Grandet’s house. Of the first three of these, the most important was Monsieur Cruchot’s nephew. Ever since he had been appointed president of the county court at Saumur, this young man had added the name of Bonfons to that of Cruchot and had been working hard to make Bonfons supersede Cruchot. He already signed himself
C. de Bonfons. If any litigant was ill-advised enough to call him Monsieur Cruchot, he soon became aware of his blunder in court. The magistrate favoured those who called him ‘Monsieur le Président’ but he bestowed his most generous smiles on the flatterers who said ‘Monsieur de Bonfons’. Monsieur le Président was thirty-three years old and owned the estate of Bonfons (Boni Fontis), which brought in an income of seven thousand livres a year.
How Felix makes the money from his wives estate
This is the story of a girl crushed by her father. She is generous and lovely, but she is crushed by Felix and his decisions over the years. Balzac captures the stifling nature of being trapped in a small village that happens to Eugenie and her mother before her. It is hard to avoid comparing this to Dickens. There is a feeling Felix is the Anit Scrooge in a way. He is a miser like Scrooge, but unlike Scrooge, we see what happens when someone so focused on control of his family’s wealth, But there is also a way he could be compared to Miss Havisham as he goes through life his world shrinks like Miss Havisham. Eugenie isn’t like any Dickens character. She is crushed by her father. The generous soul she is is at every turn blocked and tried to be broken by her father. But like Dickens, it is a long look at how wealth has now dropped from the landowners to the merchants and how greed can cause men to act a certain way. Felix could have come from a Dickens novel in a way. He has touched on Mr Murdstone (I’m just rereading David Copperfield for later this month ). Have you read this or any other books by Balzac that may have influenced Dickens as both saw how greed can influence people to act.
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