Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In a wild, overgrown park deep in the French countryside, two gentlemen out hunting glimpse a creature that stops the blood — a young woman, ragged and beautiful, wild as an animal and without a spark of reason in her eyes. One of the men, Colonel Philippe de Sucy, knows her face. She is the Countess Stéphanie de Vandières — the woman he loved and lost years before, at the freezing passage of the Beresina, in the ruin of Napoleon's retreat from Russia.

There, on the ice, torn from him and swept away amid the drowning and the fire, her last word to him had been a single despairing cry: Adieu. The horror of that night shattered her mind, and she has lived ever since in a silent madness, tended by her uncle and remembering nothing and no one. Philippe, unable to bear it, resolves on a terrible and tender gamble: to rebuild the very scene that destroyed her reason, and so, perhaps, to call her back — whatever the cost.

Published in 1830 and set against one of history's most terrible retreats, Adieu is one of Balzac's most haunting short works — a study of love, war, madness, and the fearful price of trying to undo the past. It belongs to his vast Human Comedy.

This illustrated edition renders the tale in the cold light of that Russian winter — the cast and their portraits, the map of the retreat, the great scenes, and six movement plates you unlock as you read, each drawing the story so far together without revealing what waits ahead. Turn the page, and step into the ruined park.