The Girl with the Golden Eyes

By Honoré de Balzac

Book 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.

A handsome, brilliant, consummate hedonist, 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 catches sight of the girl, he is infatuated. And so is she. Though closely guarded by a stern chaperone, she manages to brush against him in the street and squeeze his hand. Desperate for another glimpse of this "woman of fire," Henri returns every day to where he last saw her until he learns her name, Paquita Valdes, and her address, a forbidding mansion on the Rue Saint-Lazare protected by vicious dogs. Penetrating this palace becomes Henri's obsession. He makes elaborate plans and enlists the help of a secret society, the Devorants, but when at last he enters, he learns a bitter truth not only about the girl but about his own half-sister. His erotic quest ends in bloodshed.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes is one of the most memorable and fantastic episodes in Balzac's Human Comedy--its dark vision of Paris and human sexuality an inspiration to Oscar Wilde in Salom and to Marcel Proust, whose Baron de Charlus praises its author for his knowledge "even of those passions which the rest of the world ignores, or studies only to castigate them."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1681379066
• ISBN13: 9781681379067
• Release Date: July 2025
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Parisian pulp fiction

This novella, the middle volume in Balzac's History of the Thirteen, is perhaps best thought of as a penny dreadful with a pedigree or a kind of Jim Thompson noir with literary pretensions. It's the melodramatic tale of Henri de Marsay, a physically beautiful but spiritually empty young man who devotes all his time to the pursuit of sensation and sensual pleasure. He develops a burning lust for the inaccessible golden-eyed girl of the title, Paquita Valdes. It's tempting to image that her eye-color is meant to indicate that she's merely an object, but I don't know that we can read that much into Balzac. At any rate, de Marsay does manage to seduce her, but becomes enraged when he realizes that she's the kept pet of a hidden rival, for whom he's something of a stand-in during their lovemaking. He cooks up a plan of revenge but by the time he arrives at the seraglio to effect it, Paquita has been murdered by her original lover, who turns out to be none other than Henri's equally beautiful and heartless half-sister. None of the characters are the least bit sympathetic, but as an indictment of Parisian life and French mores it's enjoyable enough.

formidable book

Excellent book, full of intelligence, to understand what beauty is.