The characters are extremely well described. Perhaps the two lovers are the least striking of any in the book. Lucia is a simple peasant girl; Renzo, a rash, impulsive, kindly boy, easily led, a very natural, grown-up child such as Italy produces in greater luxuriance than colder and severer latitudes. There are no passionate love scenes in the book. The affection of the betrothed for each other seems rather an incident than the principal theme of the story. Don Ferrante, the husband of Donna Prassede, is a fine type of scholastic pedantry. The catalogue of his ridiculous acquirements in the absurd philosophy and learning of the time, with long lists of authors now unknown, reminds us of the studies of Don Quixote; Don Ferrante, too, is skilled in the science of chivalry, wherein he enjoyed the title of “Professor,” and “not only argued on it in a real, masterly manner, but, frequently requested to interfere in affairs of honor, always gave some decision.”
The officiousness of Donna Prassede is well set forth in the following:
“It was well for Lucia that she was not the only one to whom Donna Prassede had to do good.... Besides the rest of the family, all of whom were persons more or less needing amendment and guidance—besides all the other occasions which offered themselves to her, or she contrived to find, of extending the same kind offices, of her own free will, to many to whom she was under no obligations; she had also five daughters, none of whom were at home, but who gave her much more to think about than if they had been. Three of these were nuns, two were married; hence Donna Prassede naturally found herself with three monasteries, and two houses to superintend; a vast and complicated undertaking, and the more arduous, because two husbands, backed by fathers, mothers, and brothers; three abbesses, supported by other dignitaries, and by many nuns, would not accept her superintendence. It was a complete warfare, alias five warfares, concealed, and even courteous, up to a certain point, but ever active, ever vigilant. There was in every one of these places a continued watchfulness to avoid her solicitude, to close the door against her counsels, to elude her inquiries, and to keep her in the dark, as far as possible, on every undertaking. We do not mention the resistance, the difficulties she encountered in the management of other still more extraneous affairs; it is well known that one must generally do good to men by force.”
The story, like some other of the greatest works of fiction—like Don Quixote, Les Misérables, nay, like Henry Esmond itself, is somewhat too prolix. The long historical citations, the extracts from the edicts and proclamations of the time, look as if the author considered it necessary to prove his story rather than to let it prove itself. That Renzo and Lucia should leave Father Cristoforo to die alone is, to my mind, the most serious blemish in the book; but in spite of these shortcomings, “The Betrothed” is entitled to one of the first places in the front rank of the masterpieces of fiction.
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: