The Balzac Collection Volume 9

Calyste du Guénic has grown up in medieval Guérande, beloved and untested, formed entirely by a world that has never refused him anything. The two women who will complete his education are already at work: Camille Maupin, who understands him completely and cannot protect him from himself; and Béatrix de Rochefide, who is exactly what his idealism requires and nothing like what he imagines.Desplein is the most celebrated surgeon in France and its most committed atheist - a man who has spent his career inside the human body and found there no evidence that requires a God. Four times a year, he attends mass at Saint-Sulpice. His former student Bianchon has seen him there and cannot understand it, until Desplein explains: a water carrier from Saint-Flour named Bourgeat once sustained him through poverty and asked for nothing in return, and died a devout Catholic, and Desplein cannot pray for him and cannot do nothing.Pierre Grassou is a mediocre painter and he knows it. He produces copies for a dealer who sells them to bourgeois collectors as old masters, and the collectors are delighted, and Grassou marries one of their daughters and is happy. The real artists he knows are uncompromising and intermittently starving. Balzac presents this without editorial comment, which is the most devastating thing he could do.This ninth volume of the Balzac Collection brings together Béatrix, The Atheist's Mass, and Pierre Grassou - three works from La Comédie humaine that approach, from entirely different directions, the same persistent Balzacian question: what is the distance between the official account of a life and its actual content, and what does it cost to cross it?Three masterworks. Three reckonings. One ruthlessly honest intelligence.