In the Library
Eugenie Grandet
Honoré de Balzac, 1833
- Form
- Form Novel
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Clara Bell
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 76k words
£1.99
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About the book
In the shuttered house of Saumur's richest miser, a stack of gold coins is the one gift Eugenie Grandet has ever been given with anything like love: birthday by birthday, poured into her hands and immediately locked away again. When her ruined cousin Charles arrives from Paris, grieving and penniless, she gives him every coin she owns, in secret, and waits. Balzac builds an entire moral universe out of what happens next: her father's fury when the gold goes missing, a mother frightened into her grave, a daughter starved on bread and water in her own room for the crime of loving someone. Old Grandet dies still reaching for gold, his hand closing on a priest's gilt crucifix as if it were coin. Eugenie inherits millions and spends the rest of her life discovering what no fortune can buy back. Few novels make greed feel so intimate, or innocence so exactly, unbearably priced.