Eugenie Grandet (Oxford World's Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Good as gold
Review: Monsieur Grandet, the father of the titular heroine of Balzac's short novel "Eugenie Grandet," is not just a miser; he is a caricature of a miser, a modern Midas whose first love is gold, as ornately drawn as Dickens's Scrooge, but somehow more believable. He is an elderly vintner living with his wife and daughter Eugenie, his only child, in a provincial French town called Saumur, and even they don't know exactly how much money he has. He is so stingy he has let his house fall into decrepitude and doles out basic necessities like sugar, candles, and firewood as though there were a shortage. He is so sinfully avaricious that even on his deathbed he can only lust for the priest's silver crucifix. He is devious, too--he has a disarmingly strange business manner in which he feigns stammering and deafness to derail his opponent's train of thought. He is, in short, one of the best characters a reader could hope for.

Given the power of Grandet's presence and the extremity of his greed, a reader might expect him to be due for a fall, but Balzac is more interested in demonstrating how Eugenie becomes a noble woman despite, or perhaps because of, her parental influence. The story concerns the fortune of her spoiled but innocent cousin Charles, the son of Grandet's younger brother in Paris, and how she deals with his change in personality after he goes abroad to seek employment after his father's debt-induced suicide and returns having engaged in the cruel enterprise of slave trading. (I was reminded of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, who is hardened by the competitiveness of world commerce into rationalizing his immoral business pursuits.) He forsakes his love for Eugenie by arranging a marriage of convenience to another girl to increase his social status, revealing himself to be as cold and calculating as his uncle, but Eugenie triumphs in the end through her magnanimity.

This is the third Balzac novel I've read, and the third I'd label a masterpiece. Here we have a fascinating study of the interplay between four very strong characters--Old Grandet, his sheltered and naive but soon-to-be-wise daughter, his libertine nephew, and his trusted female servant Nanon, who appears to have the most goodness and common sense of anybody in the story--woven into an elegant tale that has the simplicity and moral lucidity of a fable with the substance of a Shakespearean drama, the work of a playwright at heart who prefers to write in prose. Whether or not it was his intention, Balzac convinces us, with delicious satire instead of tedious didacticism, that there are lessons to be learned from the examples set by flawed as well as virtuous people.