In the Library
Colonel Chabert
Honoré de Balzac, 1832
- Form
- Form Novella
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
- Chapters
- Chapters 2
- Length
- Length 24k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Taken out of the Foundling Hospital to die in the Infirmary for the Aged, after helping Napoleon between whiles to conquer Egypt and Europe.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Father Goriot
Honoré de Balzac
The same lawyer, Derville, and the very father he mentions here: a man who gave his daughters everything and was left to die in a garret.
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The Overcoat
Nikolai Gogol
Gogol does the same thing in forty pages, a small man erased by an office, except that Gogol lets his ghost take something back.
£1.99
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Dickens builds a whole city around the idea Balzac states in one line, that a suit can be won and still consume everyone who waits for it.
£1.99
About the book
A man in a shabby box-coat keeps appearing at a lawyer's door in the Rue Vivienne, and the clerks amuse themselves firing bread pellets at his hat. He looks, one of them says, as though he had been buried and dug up again. He was. At Eylau a sabre opened his skull, he went into the pit with the other dead, and he clawed his way back out through the bodies. Now he is in Paris saying that he is Colonel Chabert, and Paris would greatly prefer that he were not. His widow is a countess with a peer for a husband and two children, and his death is the ground her whole life stands on. Balzac is at his coldest here, and his clearest: the law can be entirely on your side and still hand you nothing. The wound in the head is not what finishes this man. What finishes him is that he was decent, and that he loved her.