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In the provincial town of Saumur, old Félix Grandet, a former cooper who has grown rich through shrewd deals, keeps his wife and daughter in near-poverty…
In the provincial town of Saumur, old Félix Grandet, a former cooper who has grown rich through shrewd deals, keeps his wife and daughter in near-poverty, rationing sugar and candles while his gold piles up. When his elegant young nephew Charles arrives from Paris just as his own father has gone bankrupt, Eugénie falls in love for the first time and secretly gives him her savings.
Context and significance
Published in 1833, this is one of the most compact and accessible novels of Balzac's vast Human Comedy, and Grandet is one of literature's great misers, alongside Molière's Harpagon. The quiet tragedy of Eugénie, who waits for years in a house without warmth, is the heart of the book.
About the author
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was born in Tours, trained as a lawyer and failed as a printer and publisher, leaving debts that pursued him all his life. To pay them he wrote at night, fuelled by enormous quantities of coffee, producing nearly a hundred novels and stories in twenty years.
He gathered them into The Human Comedy, a vast portrait of French society with characters who reappear from book to book; Eugénie Grandet is one of its best-known parts. After eighteen years of letters he married the Polish countess Ewelina Hańska, months before his death.