Who will marry Eugénie Grandet?
This short classic novel, set in the town of Saumur in
post-revolution France, tells the story of a miser, Felix Grandet and the
coming of age of his daughter Eugénie. She will inherit the miser’s millions
and make her future husband a wealthy man. Two young men are thrust forward by their
families to compete for her favour, but the sudden arrival of her exotic cousin
Charles from Paris, upsets their plans and brings Eugénie into conflict with her
father.
Balzac sets the tone of the novel from the first sentence: “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”. The house of M. Grandet is “pale, grey, cold and silent”
and Grandet is “like a serpent, impassive, cold and methodical”. This oppressive atmosphere speaks of the insidious effect of avarice on the life of Felix Grandet. How his life, and the lives of those around him are blighted by greed, is a
main theme of the novel.
Ten years after Balzac’s Felix Grandet, Dickens would create
the character of Ebenezer Scrooge - a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping,
clutching, covetous old sinner! But
unlike Dickens who uses supernatural visitations to bring Scrooge to a place of
remorse and repentance, Balzac is no romantic:
Misers do not believe in an afterlife. The present is
everything for them. This thought casts a terrible light on the present day,
when, more than ever before, money dominates the law, politics and social
behaviour. Institutions books men and doctrines all conspire to undermine the
belief in a life to come which has been the foundation of the social fabric for
eighteen hundred years.
Melancholy and gloom pervade the Grandet household, where the miser rations out the food for the day in the morning and allows only one candle to illuminate the darkness at night. Eugénie and her mother live lives of subservience and scarcely leave the house except to go to church. They are gentle souls who submit to the tyranny under which they live. Yet as the novel progresses Balzac challenges this mercenary outlook in the character of Eugenie. When her cousin arrives from Paris she knows for the first time what it is to fall in love and the experience is overwhelming, Her generous nature, long suppressed, is aroused and, she is completely at odds with her father, She calculates how much money her father has made from selling his wine and says:
"Then Father, you can easily help Charles.
The astonishment, the fury, the stupefaction of Balthazar when he saw Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin written on the wall, were as nothing compared to Grandet's cold rage when, having forgotten about his nephew, he found the young man lodged in his daughter's heart and calculations.
The novel is a masterful exploration of the themes of love,
money, greed, and the corrupting influence of wealth. Balzac presents a vivid
and detailed portrait of the world of 19th-century France, with its rigid
social hierarchy, its obsession with wealth and status, and its hidden depths
of cruelty and deceit.
His prose is rich, lyrical, and highly evocative, capturing
the atmosphere of 19th-century France in all its glory and squalor. Eugénie
Grandet is a timeless masterpiece of French literature, a work of profound
insight and understanding that speaks to the complexities of the human
condition. It is a novel that has stood the test of time and continues to
captivate and enchant readers today.
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