Eugenie Grandet

Eugenie Grandet is an 1833 novel by Honoré de Balzac, set in the provincial town of Saumur and later incorporated into La Comédie humaine.

Félix Grandet is enormously wealthy but keeps his wife and daughter Eugénie in a dark, frugal household governed by his avarice. On Eugénie's birthday, her elegant cousin Charles arrives from Paris, unaware that his father has been ruined and has taken his own life.

Eugénie's compassion becomes love, and she gives Charles her private savings before he leaves to rebuild his fortune overseas. Her father responds with rage and confinement; years later, Charles returns with money but without the loyalty that sustained her.

Balzac builds a quiet tragedy from wills, investments, marriage plans, and domestic routines. Against Grandet's worship of possession, Eugénie's generosity becomes both a moral victory and the source of her isolation.

"There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the skeleton of ruins; life and movement are so stagnant there that a stranger might think them uninhabited, were it not that he encounters suddenly the pale, cold glance of a motionless person, whose half-monastic face peers beyond the window-casing at the sound of an unaccustomed step."

This edition uses the English translation by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.