The Balzac Collection - Volume 7: A New Translation
Pierrette Lorrain is a child, an orphan, sent to live with cousins she has never met in the provincial town of Provins. The Rogrons are former shopkeepers newly arrived at modest prosperity and desperate for social respectability. What Pierrette provides them, from the first day, is an unpaid servant. What Provins provides the Rogrons is the political protection of a town whose ultra-royalist establishment prefers not to examine too closely what is happening in the Rogron household. By the time anyone looks closely enough, it is too late.
Dinah de la Baudraye is the most intelligent person in Sancerre and has been for years - she runs the town's best salon, inspires its leading citizens, and is married to a man of no cultivation whatsoever. When the Parisian journalist Lousteau arrives and recognizes her quality, she follows him to Paris, discovers what Parisian literary life actually consists of, and learns that being recognized is not the same as being valued.
The narrator of Facino Cane has a gift: the ability, through sustained imaginative attention, to inhabit the inner life of the people he observes so completely that their history becomes briefly available to him. At a wedding dance in a poor Parisian quarter, he meets an old blind musician who was once a Venetian nobleman - who murdered a man, was imprisoned in the Leads, found a treasure hidden in the prison's foundations, escaped at the cost of his sight, and has spent the decades since organizing his entire existence around the possibility of return.
This seventh volume of the Balzac Collection brings together Pierrette, The Muse of the Department, and Facino Cane - three works from La Com die humaine in which the gap between what a life appears to be and what it actually contains is the subject, and Balzac's refusal to look away from that gap is the method.
Precise, unsparing, and - in the case of Pierrette - devastating.
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