The Girl with the Golden Eyes

by Honore de Balzac

Overview

In this influential novella, regarded as one of Balzac’s greatest works, a dissolute aristocrat competes with a shadowy rival for the love of an enigmatic golden-eyed woman–a crazed and annihilating conflict that plays out in the most darkly decadent corners of Parisian high society.

Beautiful and amoral, Henri de Marsay believes in neither man nor woman, neither God nor the devil. He believes in Paris, a city of decadence and sin, a city where every passion is resolved into gold or pleasure.

From the first moment Henri de Marsay catches sight of the girl with the golden eyes he is completely and utterly infatuated. Desperate for another glimpse of her dark and enigmatic beauty, every day he returns to where he last saw her. Over time, he learns of her name, Paquita Valdes, and of her address, a forbidding and heavily guarded mansion on the Rue Saint-Lazare.

Vowing to make her his, Henri de Marsay plots his elaborate seduction of the mysterious girl with the golden eyes, but with his triumph comes the bitter revelation that he has a powerful rival for her love—the Marquise de San-Real, his own half-sister.

A cry of vengeance and the call for blood bring Balzac’s taut exploration of the dark side of Parisian society to its unexpected if inevitable conclusion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783734083921
Publisher:	Outlook Verlag
Publication date:	09/25/2019
Pages:	66
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.16(d)

About the Author

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, began his career as a pseudonymous writer of sensational potboilers before achieving wider literary success. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years. NYRB Classics publishes his The Lily in the Valley, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, The Unknown Masterpiece, and The Human Comedy: Selected Stories.

Carol Cosman was a translator of French literature and letters. She translated Balzac’s The Human Comedy: Selected Stories for NYRB Classics.

Robert Alter is professor in the graduate school and emeritus professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He has written widely on the European novel from the eighteenth century to the present, on contemporary American fiction, and on modern Hebrew literature.

What People are Saying About This

Hugo Von Hoffmannstal

The beginning might have come from the pen of Dante, the end from the Thousand and One Nights; but the whole could only be the work of the man who wrote it.
—(Hugo Von Hoffmannstal)

Editorial Reviews

Part of his "History of the Thirteen" trilogy, Balzac's novella deals with the dark side of love as protagonist Henri de Marsay's attempts to seduce an innocent girl lead to jealousy and revenge. This volume is suitable for academic collections supporting French literature curricula.

Library Journal

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