Eugenie Grandet (Penguin Classics) by Honoré de Balzac - Misers Daughter Keeps Vow, Cousin Finks Out

In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur lives the miser Grandet with his wife and daughter, Eugenie, 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 Eugenies own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. Eugenie Grandet is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzacs Comedie humaine cycle, his magnificent panorama of post-Revolutionary French life, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice.

Misers Daughter Keeps Vow, Cousin Finks Out
If Père Goriot is about different kinds of love or passion, EUGENIE GRANDET is definitely about money, greed and miserliness. In the former novel, we see the title character through the eyes of a newcomer to Paris, Eugene de Rastignac. In EUGENIE GRANDET, the dominant personality, bigger than life, still extremely vivid after 175 years, is old Monsieur Grandet, former cooper turned landowner and financial speculator. Eugenie is his daughter whose fate is sealed by her miserly, grasping, scheming father and his overpowering lust for gold. A handsome young cousin from Paris appears---a dandy, the spoiled child of a rich father. We learn at once that his fathers affairs have gone bad; he has committed suicide, a bankrupt. The young people fall in love during Charles stay in the provinces at his uncles penurious table. But, the young man must soon depart for the Indies to seek a new fortune. Meanwhile, two local families vie for Eugenies hand--actually, only for the enormous inheritance which she shall surely receive. The old miser plays them off against each other with great skill. Eugenie refuses all their offers and even resists her domineering father, remaining loyal to her long-lost cousin at the other end of the world. When Charles returns to France, having made a new fortune in the slave trade, he promptly hooks up with a noble family from the capital, re-connecting with his old mistress as well. Eugenie is left alone, but she remains true to her pure, simple ideals, using the fortune that she eventually inherits for good works.

I think this novel is one of the most powerful and best-written studies of a single character ever written. I am talking about the miser, shrewd old M. Grandet. Eugenie and her mother are purer, psychologically less complex, marked in everything by Monsieur Grandets drive to become ever richer. French provincial life at the time in all its dreary repetition and petty rivalries comes alive with Balzacs pen---down to the kind of door knockers they had, the low-stakes card games, the yellow wax tapers. This provincial life, the effect of stinginess on a family, the power of constant love, and above all, a fascination with money and the people who amass it, are themes that mark this most powerful novel. You may think it sounds a rather basic tale, but Balzacs writing, as ever, is powerful and fascinating. One of the great books of world literature ! Dont miss it.

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