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Eugenie GrandetEugénie Grandet Reading Order
Eugénie Grandet (1833) by Honoré de Balzac is one of the most emotionally concentrated of the major Comédie Humaine novels — a short, sharp, devastating portrait of a miser's daughter in the provincial town of Saumur. Père Grandet is one of the great misers in literature, a man who has reduced his entire life to the accumulation of gold and whose treatment of his wife and daughter is completely organized around the demands of parsimony. Eugénie is his daughter — gentle, self-effacing, capable of great love — who falls in love with her charming Parisian cousin Charles when he arrives at the Grandet house on the way to ruin, gives him all her gold savings so that he can rebuild his fortune in the Indies, waits for him for years while he grows rich and corrupt in the colonies, and is finally abandoned by him when he returns to marry a titled woman. The novel is both a study in the psychology of avarice and a portrait of provincial France — the suffocating narrowness of small-town life, the way money determines everything, and what it costs a person of genuine feeling to live in a world organized entirely around property.
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Eugénie Grandet (1833)
Complete Eugenie Grandet Book List
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Eugénie Grandet
Honoré de Balzac·1833
Eugenie Grandet — Frequently Asked Questions
Where does Eugénie Grandet fit in the Comédie Humaine?
Eugénie Grandet is one of the earliest Comédie Humaine novels — Balzac published it in 1833, two years before Père Goriot, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. It belongs to the 'Scenes from Provincial Life' section of the Comédie Humaine, which is organized around the distinctive psychology and sociology of French provincial towns — the way that the removal of Paris's excitement and competition produces a culture of gossip, parsimony, and intense attention to money and property. Eugénie Grandet is the purest expression of this provincial psychology, organized entirely around the character of the miser.
Is Père Grandet based on a real person?
Balzac drew on local color from the Saumur region (where he had visited) and on his general knowledge of provincial business types, but Père Grandet is not based on a specific identified individual. He belongs to a long tradition of literary misers — Molière's Harpagon in The Miser, Shakespeare's Shylock, Dickens's Ebenezer Scrooge — but Balzac's Grandet is more precisely sociological than his predecessors: his miserliness is not a comic trait but the product of a specific historical moment (the Revolution, which allowed men of business to buy up seized properties cheaply) and a specific French provincial culture (where wealth is accumulated rather than displayed).
How does Eugénie Grandet end?
Charles Grandet returns from the Indies rich and corrupt, having made his fortune through slave trading and other dubious colonial enterprises. He has forgotten Eugénie completely and is now engaged to a noblewoman whose title will give him social advancement. Eugénie, learning of this through social gossip, marries a local man of good character (Cruchot de Bonfons) who has long pursued her, on the condition that he will leave her free — she will give him her hand but not her heart. Her husband dies shortly after, leaving her enormously wealthy (she has inherited both Grandet's vast fortune and her husband's). The novel ends with Eugénie alone, wealthy beyond any use she can make of the money, having given it away to charity, spending her life between charity and prayer — a figure of goodness entirely wasted by the world that Balzac has constructed for her.
Is Eugénie Grandet a short novel?
Yes — Eugénie Grandet is one of the shortest and most concentrated of Balzac's major novels, approximately 200 pages in most translations. It is the ideal introduction to Balzac for readers who are uncertain about committing to the length of Père Goriot or Lost Illusions. Everything characteristic of Balzac is present here — the sociological precision, the psychological intensity, the portrait of money and its effects — in a form that can be read in a single sitting by a determined reader.
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