EUGENIE GRANDET
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
It is not quite fair to Balzac to judge him by any one of the stories in his encyclopædic “Comedie Humaine.” The countless varieties of life and character which he portrays show the author’s versatility and power, and have perhaps a value from their very number which can not be adequately treated when we consider only a single specimen of his work. Many of his characters, it is true, are grotesques; some are absolute deformities; others are hard to understand by any but a Frenchman,—French human nature, as it seems to me, being a little different from human nature elsewhere; but there is one great work of his which, although it is not without its morbid side, must appeal to the common consciousness of all mankind, and bring to every human heart the conviction of its spiritual truth. “Eugenie Grandet” is a novel of this universal kind of excellence.
The plot is a very simple one. M. Grandet is a miser who lives in an old comfortless house in Saumur with his wife, his daughter Eugenie, and big Nanon, the maid of all work. The Cruchots and the De Grassins are intriguing for the hand of the heiress, and on Eugenie’s birthday, when all these are assembled, a stranger unexpectedly appears, Charles Grandet, her cousin, committed to the care of his uncle by his father in Paris, who has become a bankrupt and has determined upon suicide. Charles, however, knows nothing of this, and is overcome with pitiful grief when he learns of his father’s death. Eugenie, a simple minded girl, falls in love with him, but the old miser, anxious to get rid of him, sends him to the Indies. Grandet’s tyranny over his wife and child is graphically portrayed. The poor wife succumbs to it and dies. It is not long till the miser follows her, and Eugenie is left alone with a colossal fortune for which she cares nothing, and with a lover from whom she has received no word. In the meantime Charles has acquired a fortune of his own, and on his return writes to her that he wishes to marry another. Her dream is over, the light of her life is extinguished; she gives her hand without her heart to Cruchot, and upon his death continues her hopeless life alone in the desolate home, administering her estate with economy, but devoting its proceeds to works of beneficence.
This is a story, the like of which has happened many a time in actual life, but the cold skeleton of the tale as given above conveys not the slightest idea of the warm flesh and blood with which it is invested. The description of the old street and the dreary house and its furniture is a literary jewel. The account of the way in which Grandet accumulates his fortune, and of the neighborhood rumors regarding his wealth, stirs our own acquisitiveness as we read it, and shows him to be a very natural and almost inevitable sort of miser. He is moreover a man of commanding ability, who extorts respect even though he inspires abhorrence. The details of his habits, his economies, and his schemes, as well as his personal appearance, are admirably given. Equally lifelike are the descriptions of big Nanon, the devoted house-servant, starved and overtasked, yet always grateful to the master who took her when none others would; of the wife, submissive, sensitive, magnanimous, and uncomplaining; and of Eugenie, a girl who has grown up in perfect innocence of the world, pure, beautiful, and of a generous and noble spirit. All these are the subjects of an odious domestic tyranny on the part of “Goodman Grandet,” the particulars of which are set forth with powerful fidelity.
Charles is a rather uninteresting young dandy, who comes arrayed for conquest. It is not unnatural that an artless girl like Eugenie should fall in love with him, and her devices to procure him such luxuries as a cake, a wax candle, and sugar for his coffee, add to the charm of their simple love-making. The sympathy of the two women in his sorrow contrasts sharply with the sordid calculations of the miser, and the scene where Eugenie learns his needs by furtively reading two of his letters (for even her good qualities are decidedly of the French type) and then brings him her little store of gold, and when he hesitates, begs him on her knees to take it—this scene is very effective, as is also her despairing cry, after he departs, “O mother, mother, if I had God’s power for one moment!”
But the more tragic parts of this simple drama are near its close,—the stormy scene when Grandet learns that Eugenie has given Charles her money, her imprisonment in a room of the old house, her mother’s illness and patient death, and, ghastliest of all, the last hours of the miser:
“So long as he could open his eyes, where the last sparks of life seemed to linger, they used to turn at once to the door of the room where all his treasures lay, and he would say to his daughter, in tones that seemed to thrill with a panic of fear:
“‘Are they there still?’
“‘Yes, father.’
“‘Keep watch over the gold!... Let me see the gold.’
“Then Eugenie used to spread out the louis on a table before him, and he would sit for whole hours with his eyes fixed on the louis in an unseeing stare, like that of a child who begins to see for the first time; and sometimes a weak infantine smile, painful to see, would steal across his features.
“‘That warms me!’ he muttered more than once, and his face expressed a perfect content.
“When the curé came to administer the sacrament, all the life seemed to have died out of the miser’s eyes, but they lit up for the first time for many hours at the sight of the silver crucifix, the candlesticks, and holy water vessel, all of silver; he fixed his gaze on the precious metal, and the wen on his face twitched for the last time.
“As the priest held the gilded crucifix above him that the image of Christ might be laid to his lips, he made a frightful effort to clutch it—a last effort which cost him his life. He called Eugenie, who saw nothing; she was kneeling beside him, bathing in tears the hand that was growing cold already. ‘Give me your blessing, father,’ she entreated. ‘Be very careful!’ the last words came from him; ‘one day you will render an account to me of everything here below.’ Which utterance clearly shows that a miser should adopt Christianity as his religion.”
Then follows the long waiting of Eugenie; the dastardly letter sent by Charles after his return; the noble dignity with which she releases him and pays his father’s creditors to preserve the honor of one who is quite careless of it himself, and then resigns herself to her hopeless destiny.
“Eugenie Grandet” is a consummate work of art.