Monsieur Grandet is well aware of this situation, and plays it to his best advantage, in particular by acquiring the unpaid services of the local lawyer and banker – possessed respectively of an eligible nephew and son – who each hopes that his marital candidate will win out. The villagers around them, however, are fully aware of the extent of the Grandet fortunes, and there is something of a competition underway to see who will be the fortunate man to storm the stone walls, marry the beautiful and devout Eugénie, and eventually inherit the riches.

His wife, daughter, and servant, completely subservient to the soft-spoken but cunningly manipulative family patriarch, never question their situation but meekly go about their daily routines, gratefully accepting the few coins which occasionally are doled out – and promptly “borrowed” back – for “extras”. The income from these properties is immediately profitably reinvested, or else converted to gold, which Monsieur Grandet, a former cask and barrel maker, seals up in wooden chests and stores away in his walled-up “office” in the center of the old stone house.

By a series of lucky inheritances, a marriage which brought a substantial dowry, clever investments and very shrewd trading, he has purchased numerous estates which were seized from their dispossessed noble owners after the recent Revolution. The reality however, is that Monsieur Grandet is exceedingly wealthy. Firewood is doled out stick by stick, and the inhabitants of the house huddle around a shared tallow candle in the evening their clothes and shoes are worn until threadbare. Their house is decaying around them, they subsist on a restricted diet of only the cheapest provisions, with sugar doled out bit by bit, and the table graced only by unsaleable spoiled fruit and sour wine from the Grandet farms and vineyards. The Grandets live in seemingly straightened circumstances. *****Įugénie Grandet is a short novel, almost a novella, and the action, such as it is, is limited to the four walls of a gloomy stone house in the French village of Saumur, inhabited by the Grandet family: the elderly Monsieur Grandet, his wife Madame Grandet, their only daughter, Eugénie, in her early twenties as the story begins, and their sole servant, Nanon. I ended up judging it against others of a similar era which I am familiar with, such as works by Dickens, Thackeray, Dumas, and, of course, several of Balzac’s other novels in his ambitious “Human Comedy”.

It is difficult to know how to “rate” a book such as Eugénie Grandet, as its status as an early 19th Century “classic” places it in a category of its own when compared to more contemporary books. Introduction & Notes by Christopher Prendergast. This edition: Oxford University Press, 2009. Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac ~ 1833.

Honoré de balzac eugenie grandet