The Balzac Collection Volume 1

Augustine Guillaume marries a romantic painter and loves him with everything her careful, orderly, bourgeois formation has given her. He leaves her for another woman. She dies of it. Balzac places this story first in the Comédie humaine - an announcement, from the opening pages, of what kind of writer he is.In the five works that follow, the same intelligence examines the same territory from different angles. Émilie de Fontaine, whose pride requires she marry only a nobleman, falls in love with exactly the man her principles demand and, through the application of those principles, loses him before she knows what he is - and ends her story unmarried, having been defeated not by the world's inadequacy but by her own. Hippolyte Schinner, a painter in love with a woman of mysteriously reduced circumstances, learns to see what his suspicion almost prevented him from noticing. Ginevra di Piombo marries the last survivor of the family her father destroyed in a Corsican vendetta, and the vendetta, patient and absolute, consumes everyone it touches. Madame Firmiani, judged by fashionable Paris as a woman living on a young man's infatuation, is discovered by the man sent to expose her to be conducting a life of exceptional and entirely private honor. And Roger de Granville, trapped in a cold legitimate marriage, builds a second family of real warmth and love - and discovers that the social machinery surrounding him has decided, in advance, which family counts.These six works are drawn from the Scènes de la vie privée - the Scenes of Private Life - the first and most intimate section of Balzac's La Comédie humaine. Together they form the essential introduction to his world: a world in which the private arrangements of daily life are never merely private, in which love and marriage and family are the points at which social structures become most personally felt, and in which the distance between what life promises and what it delivers is measured in specific, irreversible human costs.An indispensable beginning - and, for the reader who continues, a foundation that every subsequent volume will build upon.