Before You Begin

Before you begin.

On the wind-scoured coast of Brittany stands the ancient walled town of Guérande, and within it the cold granite house of the du Guénic family — noble, devout, and desperately poor, the last of an old Chouan line. Their whole hope rests on one person: Calyste, a beautiful, pure-hearted young man of twenty who has never yet loved. Across the marshes lies Les Touches, the manor of Félicité des Touches — a woman so brilliant she writes under a man's name, Camille Maupin. Into her circle Calyste is drawn; and into that circle, one fatal day, comes the pale, golden, vain Marquise Béatrix de Rochefide.

What follows is one of Balzac's most piercing studies of love and vanity: an older woman who loves Calyste and nobly stands aside; a dazzling beauty who ensnares him for sport; a faithful wife who deserves far better; and a young man undone by a passion that outlives every reason to feel it. It moves from the granite ramparts of Brittany to the glittering, treacherous salons of Paris, where a family's cold cunning must break a spell that tenderness never could.

Balzac drew his figures from life: contemporaries recognised the novelist George Sand in Camille Maupin, the Comtesse d'Agoult in Béatrix, the composer Liszt in Conti, and the feared critic Gustave Planche in Claude Vignon. Published in 1839, Béatrix belongs to his vast Human Comedy.

This illustrated edition opens the novel into a gallery of plates — the cast and their portraits, the maps of Guérande, Le Croisic and Paris, the great scenes, and six movement plates you unlock as you read, each drawing the story so far together without ever revealing what lies ahead. Turn the page, and climb the old walls of Guérande.