Before You Begin

Before you begin.

There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, and it is behind one such gray door in the old streets of Saumur that Honoré de Balzac shuts us in. Inside lives Monsieur Grandet, a former cooper turned millionaire wine-grower, a man "something between a tiger and a boa," whose iron rule over his household is measured out in candle-ends, lumps of sugar, and six francs at a time. With him are his gentle, down-trodden wife, the faithful giantess of a servant called Nanon, and his only child—the tall, calm, luminous Eugénie, the richest heiress in the district and the prize over which two rival families silently wage war.

Into this airless world arrives Charles, Eugénie's dazzling Parisian cousin, ruined overnight and sent to a relative who counts every coin. What awakens in Eugénie is the first and only love of her life, and what she does with her small hoard of gold sets a quiet daughter against the most pitiless miser in French literature. This is Balzac at the height of his powers—a chamber drama of money and devotion in which a single secret of the heart can shake a fortune.

First published in 1833 as part of his vast Comédie humaine, Eugénie Grandet endures because Balzac saw what gold does to the people who hoard it and the people who are sacrificed to it. He turns a provincial town into a whole human universe, and a plain young woman's faithfulness into something unforgettable. Nearly two centuries on, it remains one of the most perfectly built novels ever written about greed, love, and patience.

Turn the page and step through the door into Saumur. The illustrated gallery that follows brings the house of Grandet, its master, and its quiet heroine to life—portraits, model sheets, maps, and scenes drawn entirely from the world of the book.