Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In a drowsy provincial drawing-room in Lower Normandy, a young man overhears a single name spoken in disapproving whispers — and his quiet convalescence is finished forever. The woman is the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, a great lady of the House of Burgundy who has fled Paris and a scandal to live entirely alone. The young man is Gaston de Nueil, twenty-three years old and starved for feeling. What begins as the curiosity of a bored stranger becomes one of the most piercing love stories Balzac ever wrote.

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) built the vast, interlocking world of La Comédie humaine — nearly a hundred novels and tales meant to map the whole of French society after Napoleon. The Deserted Woman belongs to that grand design, and its proud, wounded heroine reappears in Father Goriot and other stories. Yet it stands perfectly on its own: a compact, almost unbearably intimate study of a woman who has loved once, been abandoned, and resolved that she will never be made to suffer that way again.

What gives the novella its lasting power is Balzac's refusal to look away. He understands the arithmetic of the heart — the difference between an age of thirty and an age of forty, the cruelty hidden inside a kind man's hesitation, the way a single unanswered letter can settle a destiny.

This illustrated edition gathers the novella into six visual movements — recap plates you unlock as you read, each drawing together the small cast, the places, and the turns of the story so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page and step into the manor at Courcelles and the villa on Lake Geneva, and meet the proud, solitary figure of the deserted woman herself.