A hypnotic story of hatred, revenge and catastrophe in which Cousin Bette exacts a terrible price from the rich relations who use and humiliate her. This book portrays the world of post-Napoleonic France, where commercial greed and sexual debauchery are rampant among a demoralized ruling class.[...]

?Bette is a wronged soul; and when her passion does break, it is, as Balzac says, sublime and terrifying,? wrote V. S. Pritchett. A late masterpiece in Balzac?s La Comédie Humaine, Cousin Bette is the story of a Vosges peasant who rebels against her scornful upper-class relatives, skillfully turnin[...]

Eugene Rastignac, a young law student living in a boarding house, meets fellow lodger, Goriot, a ruined merchant who receives occasional secret visits from his daughters[...]

A gripping tale of violent jealousy, sexual passion and treachery, Honore de Balzac's "Cousin Bette" is translated from the French with an introduction by Marion Ayton Crawford in "Penguin Classics". Poor, plain spinster Bette is compelled to survive on the condescending patronage of her socially su[...]

Handsome would-be poet Lucien Chardon is poor and naive, but highly ambitious. Failing to make his name in his dull provincial hometown, he is taken up by a patroness, the captivating married woman Madame de Bargeton, and prepares to forge his way in the glamorous beau monde of Paris. But Lucien has[...]

Balzac is concerned with the choice between ruthless self-gratification and asceticism, dissipation and restraint, in a novel that is powerful in its symbolism and realistic depiction of decadence.[...]

'This is as much a mystery as the Immaculate Conception, which of itself must make a doctor an unbeliever.' A stunning pair of short stories about faith and sacrificial love. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and d[...]

'Who is going to marry Eugenie Grandet?'
This is the question that fills the minds of the inhabitants of Saumur, the setting for Eugenie Grandet (1833), one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac's Comedie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet[...]

'Who possesses me will possess all things, But his life will belong to me...' Raphael de Valentin, a young aristocrat, has lost all his money in the gaming parlours of the Palais Royal in Paris, and contemplates ending his life by throwing himself into the Seine. He is distracted by the bizarre arr[...]

The text is accompanied by an introduction, textual annotations by the editor, and a map of Paris. "Responses: Contemporaries and Other Novelists" illustrates Balzac's immense influence on other writers, among them Charles Baudelaire, Hippolyte Taine, Emile Zola, and Marcel Proust. "Twentieth-Centur[...]

Five of the author's most highly regarded stories, newly translated, appear in this choice collection: the title story, an examination of the conflict between an artist's commitment to his work and his obligations to others; "An Episode During the Terror," a contrast of material poverty and spiritua[...]