Booklist 2009 # 47: Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac (trans. Lowell Bair)

“In the pure and monotonous life of a young girl, there comes a delightful time when the sun shines it rays into her soul, when flowers express thoughts, when the throbbing of the heart communicates its warm fecundity to the brain and dissolves all ideas into a vague desire–a day of innocent melancholy and gentle pleasantries! When babies begin to see, they smile; when a girl first glimpses sentiment in nature, she smiles as she smiled when she was a baby. If light is the first love of life, is not love the light of the heart? The time to see clearly the things of this earth had come to Eugenie.”

Based on the strength of Verbivore’s review at Incurable Logophilia, I decided to check out Eugenie Grandet by Honore de Balzac. As my introduction written by Milton Crane notes Balzac shows an insensitivity to language. This is not to say he is a writer incapable of grace and beauty in his prose; the quote above testifies to his abilities. However, his writing often includes bland details, doesn’t know when to shut up and move on,  and even during those times when he does manage a beautiful description it lacks that sublime power and originality of a Shakespeare or a Hawthorne. To explain what I mean by that last point, even when Balzac produces the top of his game on a pure writing level, it doesn’t quite meet the standards of quality and beauty achieved by other major writers. This is not to say that he’s a bad writer, but rather to note that he occasionally falls short from aesthetic greatness. The one exception would be his choices for metaphors; his metaphors are atrocious and ridiculous, making it hard to believe the comparison because they are so over-the-top.

(Warning after this point, the plot description contain spoilers)

His style in general is heavy-handed. He constantly interrupts the narrative to add sociological commentary about his characters’ actions and personality. He enjoys telling us almost every detail of their life stories and is often interested in parts of his characters’ lives that most other writers would gloss over in order to get to the meat of the story.  This made for a very boring first half; it was so boring that I considered writing Balzac off entirely and couldn’t figure out why Verbivore enjoyed the book so much, but once I hit the middle of the book where the plot really gets rolling I understood. As it turns out Balzac has penchant for good story-telling and a fine eye for writing interesting and humorous characters.

The book tells the story of a miser who rises from rags to riches through shrewd business decisions and aggressive capitalist acumen. He has a daughter, Eugenie, who stands to inherit his vast fortune; this causes two rival neighbors, the Des Grassins and the Cuchots to be sycophantic friends of the family, each hoping to win Eugenie’s hand in marriage for suitors in their family.

In the novel, the miser’s nephew, Charles, comes to live with the family for a short time after the boy’s father goes into bankruptcy and kills himself.  This boy who has lived an extravagant lifestyle must adapt to the ascetic ways of his uncle before being shipped off to the Indies to regain his father’s lost fortune. Eugenie falls in love with her cousin and gives away her gold, which she receives as a present every holiday from her father with the hopes that it will help her develop an avarice taste for money. After receiving the gold, the cousin starts reciprocating her feelings. The two swear vows and promise to marry each other when he returns from the Indies.

After the cousin leaves to make his fortune, the miser discovers the loss of the gold. The miser grows so angry that he temporarily disowns his daughter and locks her up in her room like a prisoner. The miser’s wife grows ill over her daughter’s punishment. This eventually leads to her death. The miser learns that his daughter stands to inherit the property of his wife if his wife should die and their estates would be liquidated. Instead of letting his property be split, he reconciles with his daughter, but it is too late to save the mother from death. The miser, too, eventually dies. The Des Grassins and Cuchots continue to fight for Eugenie, but she refuses to marry, waiting for Charles to return. Charles eventually returns from India a changed man, having seen the ways of the world and slept his way around it. He decides to marry another woman to feed his ambitions of gaining a title and rising into the peerage of France, repaying back his debt to Eugenie for the gold she lent him, and breaking her heart in the process.

Some would say this novel falls under the category realism and contains many tragic elements, which may be true, but it reads like a comedy in my mind. The characters in their tragic obsessions and their poor decisions came off as comical. You cannot help laughing at the miser. Eugenie for all her pure and virtuous heart seems woefully ignorant of the world.

The well-crafted and developed Miser is hilarious, especially his death bed scene, where he clutches a silver cross that a priest holds out while praying for his soul. He becomes suspicious of his own family of robbing him of his gold. However, Balzac strikes a more realistic note than the comical miser of Plautus Pot of Gold (and Moliere’s The Miser, which I haven’t read, but know he took as an archetype) in that Grandet demonstrates other facets to his personality beyond shrew business sense, his ability to manipulate and read people, and his love of money. He seems to genuinely love his family, especially his daughter. This might sound counter-intuitive to a plot where the man locks his daughter up as a prisoner in his own home for giving away her gold and causes his wife’s death, however, there are many scenes in the book such as when he splurges on butter to allow her a cake against his normally miser nature, gives back a gold token of affection that he snatches when his daughter threatens to kill herself, that suggest he cares about his daughter and her welfare.  Hidden beneath the more obvious portrait of a miser is a father who loves his daughter. In fact, it is this conflict within himself that provides much of the internal conflict for the character. In fact, when the scene comes where he discovers that his daughter has given away the gold it isn’t entirely clear whether he is angry about the loss of the gold or angry at his daughter for not trusting him enough to tell him outright who she gave it to. His greed sometimes and often gets the better of him, but there is still this other side of his character buried deep and shown in subtle scenes throughout the narrative by a writer who is usually anything but subtle. Grandet is like an alcoholic, a person who may still love their family members, but whose substance abuse causes them to betray the ones they love, while at other times they throw away their alcohol when they realize they are hurting their family members, only to pick it up again later, in a vicious cycle.

Eugenie is also interesting. She may be virtuous, but she lacks her father’s cunning to the expense of her happiness. Indeed, another way Grandet’s character is softened a bit is that he isn’t wrong about Charles. Although Charles repays back the gold, he betrays his vows to Eugenie. She wastes all these years waiting for him; he proves to be exactly the sort of morally bankrupt person that Grandet pegged him. She might seem like the hero, but she too, isn’t without her flaws.

Balzac set out to write a sociological novel about the miser, but ended up writing a far more ambivalent work than I think most give him credit. The work strikes a satirical note in the way it detests avarice through the overbearing and ridiculous Grandet, but shows through Eugenie that naivete in a greedy world can also destroy a person. It’s a novel that shows the price one must pay with the ones they love when they distrust the world and love money more, and the price one must pay when they trust too easily and consider their self-interest too little.