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At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
Honoré de Balzac · 1830 · Romance, Drama & Literary
Balzac's opening tale of the Human Comedy. Above a dim old drapery shop in Paris, the Cat and Racket, lives Augustine, the gentle daughter of a rigid bourgeois draper. When a brilliant fashionable painter falls in love with her angelic face and marries her, two worlds collide, the world of the counter and the world of art. A tender, ironic tragedy of a marriage that beauty alone could not save.
Inside this edition
Every LitLab edition is illustrated from the text itself — the world of the book mapped, its people drawn, its scenes staged. 22 plates are open to everyone in this book; here are 8 of them.
Paris, c. 1800
The Street of the Cat and RacketThe old dark commercial street in the heart of Paris, near the rue Saint-Denis, where the little drapery shop stands beneath its cat-and-racket sign.
The Web of Connections
The Characters of the Cat and Racket
The Characters — I · The House of the Cat and RacketThe full-length cast, part one: the severe old draper Monsieur Guillaume and his wife, their daughters Augustine and Virginie, and the faithful clerk Joseph Lebas — the bourgeois world of the shop.
The Characters — II · The World of Art & SocietyThe full-length cast, part two: the painter Théodore de Sommervieux, the worldly Duchesse de Carigliano, the fashionable cousin Madame Roguin, and the painter Girodet — the glittering world that draws Augustine away.
The Painter's First Glimpse
Before the Duchesse
This edition
- Title
- At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
- Author
- Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)
- First published
- 1830
- Illustrated plates
- 45 original artworks · 22 open to everyone
- Chapters
- 6 · about 21,543 words
- Reading time
- 1 h 26 min
- Language
- EN
- Formats
- Read online · EPUB and PDF download with a subscription
- Publisher
- LitLab — The Illustrated Classics
- On LitLab since
- August 2026
- Rights
- Text in the public domain. Illustrations and edition © LitLab.
- Source text
- Project Gutenberg #1680
Neighbours in the library
Chosen by what they share with At the Sign of the Cat and Racket — the same author, the same genre.