7.41 Balzac — Eugénie Grandet — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the opening of Honoré de Balzac 's Eugénie Grandet and the evening on which Eugénie 's cousin arrives from Paris. Follow Balzac's method: a long description of a street and a house, then the people who live there, then the event that sets the story moving. Recognise his narrator, who comments, generalises and judges, unlike Flaubert's. Understand the novel's subject, money as the one god of the modern world, and its victims. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Ce mur sert à étaler les marchandises du négociant. This wall serves to display the merchant's goods. il sait, à une planche près, combien il peut de tonneaux si la récolte est bonne he knows, to within a plank, how many barrels he can make if the harvest is good ils redoutent la pluie, le vent, la sécheresse, et veulent de l’eau, du chaud, des nuages, à leur fantaisie. they dread rain, wind and drought, and want water, warmth and clouds just as they please. et offrait, au premier aspect, une vague ressemblance avec ces fruits cotonneux qui n’ont plus ni saveur ni suc. and at first sight bore a vague resemblance to those woolly fruits that have neither flavour nor juice left. As-tu quelques sous à me prêter ? Have you got a few sous to lend me? Vous jouez au loto, ma tante, You are playing lotto, aunt, Prerequisites : 7.40 — this reading follows 7.40 Reading . You read the opening of Balzac's Le Père Goriot in 7.25 Reading ; this novel was written two years earlier and uses the same method on a provincial town. About this text Eugénie Grandet (1833) is one of the Scènes de la vie de province of Balzac's Comédie humaine . In Saumur, on the Loire, old Grandet, a former cooper who has grown immensely rich from wine and speculation, lives as a miser in a dark house with his wife, his daughter Eugénie and his servant Nanon. Two families of the town, the Cruchots and the des Grassins, court Eugénie for her inheritance. One November evening in 1819 her cousin Charles, an elegant young man from Paris, arrives with a letter from his father to Grandet; Eugénie falls in love with him, and her life is decided. This lesson gives about 3,800 words from the first chapter: the description of the street and the house, the evening of Eugénie 's birthday with her mother and Nanon, and the arrival of Charles during a game of lotto. The long middle section on Grandet's career and fortune is left out, and omissions are marked […] . The text is that of volume five of the Œuvres complètes published in Paris by Alexandre Houssiaux in 1855, as transcribed in French Wikisource. This edition prints the first description as a single paragraph of more than twelve hundred words; read it slowly, a sentence at a time. Reading Balzac From the street to the house. Balzac begins with a general statement, Il se trouve dans certaines provinces des maisons , then narrows it to one street in Saumur, then to its shops, its trades and its gossip, and only at the end to one door: la maison à monsieur Grandet . The reader enters the story the way a visitor would walk up the street. A narrator who judges. Balzac's narrator does not hide. He exclaims, Sublimité perdue ! , he asks the reader questions, he draws general laws: il n'y a pas un de ses bonheurs qui ne vienne d'une ignorance quelconque . Compare Flaubert in 7.36 Reading , who never comments. Money. In the lotto scene the narrator names the real subject: Grandet is the image of le seul dieu moderne auquel on ait foi, l'Argent . Every guest is there for his millions; only Eugénie , her mother and Nanon do not think of money, because they know nothing about it. The cousin. Charles arrives like un paon dans quelque obscure basse-cour de village , a peacock in a farmyard. His eyeglass on a chain, his assurance and his Paris manners make the whole room look shabby, and Eugénie looks at him with growing wonder. Reading it a second time, part by part The street. Old houses of wood and stone in the high town of Saumur; shops without windows; merchants whose fortunes depend on the weather; neighbours who watch everything. The birthday. In November 1819 the fire is lit for the first time, in honour of Eugénie 's twenty-third birthday. Her father gives her a gold coin, as every year, for her douzain , her wedding purse. Madame Grandet. A gentle, plain, pious woman who brought her husband a fortune and never asks him for anything; he gives her six francs at a time. The broken stair. Nanon almost falls on a rotten step; Grandet, generous for once, gives her a glass of blackcurrant liqueur and goes to mend the step himself. The lotto. The Cruchots and the des Grassins play lotto in the grey room, all thinking of Grandet's millions; Grandet thinks they are his harpoons. The arrival. A loud knock: a young man from Paris with enormous trunks. It is Charles, the son of Grandet's brother. He examines everyone through his eyeglass, and Eugénie cannot stop looking at him. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. Eugénie Grandet In certain provinces there are houses whose sight inspires a melancholy equal to that aroused by the gloomiest cloisters, the dullest moors or the saddest ruins. Perhaps these houses hold at once the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of the moors and the bones of the ruins. Life and movement are so quiet in them that a stranger would think them uninhabited, if he did not suddenly meet the pale, cold gaze of some motionless person whose half-monastic face rises above the window sill at the sound of an unfamiliar step. These elements of melancholy are found in the look of a dwelling in Saumur, at the end of the hilly street that leads up to the castle through the upper part of the town. This street, now little used, hot in summer, cold in winte