Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Half-way down an old street in the heart of Paris, above a dim drapery shop hung with the ancient painted sign of a cat playing at battledore — the Cat and Racket — lives the family of Monsieur Guillaume, a rich, rigid, old-fashioned draper who measures the whole world by the counting-house. His younger daughter, Augustine, is a gentle, dreaming girl, an angel raised among bales of cloth, who longs without knowing it for a life of feeling and beauty her thrifty family cannot imagine.

One morning a brilliant young painter, Théodore de Sommervieux, passing home from a ball, is struck dumb by her face at a high window. He paints her, exhibits her at the Salon, and marries her against all her family's prudent horror. But theirs is a marriage of two worlds — the world of the counter and the world of art — and what dazzles a painter for a season cannot, it seems, hold him for a life. As his love cools and drifts toward a great and worldly lady, the Duchesse de Carigliano, Augustine must learn what her simple heart was never armed to bear.

Published in 1830, At the Sign of the Cat and Racket is the very first story of Balzac's vast Human Comedy — a small, perfect, ironic tragedy about beauty, class, and the cruel distance between two people who love each other and cannot meet.

This illustrated edition opens the tale into a gallery of plates — the cast and their portraits, the house and the Paris around it, the great scenes, and six movement plates you unlock as you read, each gathering the story so far without ever revealing what waits ahead. Turn the page, and step into the old shop at dawn.