The books in this section are usually hardcover and in decent shape, though we'll sometimes offer hard-to-find books in lesser condition at a reduced price. Though we often put images of the book with their original dust jackets, the copies here won't always (or even often) have them. If that is important to you, please call ahead or say so in the order comments!
In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugénie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugénie's own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice.
First published in 1833, this is one of the earliest and finest works in Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume La Comédie humaine cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. It was while he was writing Eugénie Grandet that Balzac conceived of his ambitious project and almost immediately prepared a second edition, revising the names of some of the characters so that Eugénie Grandet then fit into the section: Scenes from provincial life (Scènes de la vie de province) in the Comédie.
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