The love of money and the passionate pursuit of it, studied in detail in the person of Grandet, is seen as a dynamic force in society. But the dynamics that infects all the characters (except Eugenie and her mother) who are after the hand of rich heiress has an ugly face. Grandet is totally insensitive to the anguish of his daughter and, of course, his wife. Not once do his habitual expressions of greed and avarice turn into the lineaments of thought and conscience. All that mattered was the hoard of gold and if his own flesh and blood suffered because of that obsession, it was just too bad.



Grandet is an avaricious man and it is avarice in its worst form that surfaces when he is faced with the prospect of his daughter's marriage and the gold snatched away from him. But Balzac doesn't tell us why. He doesn't have his characters examining, dissecting and explaining themselves from breakfast soliloquies to evening meditations on this and that. He has no time for such nonsense because he had a vision of the world based on what he saw, observed and experienced.
uneventfulEugénie Grandet (1833) is a novel by Honoré de Balzac about miserliness, and how it is bequeathed from the father to the daughter, Eugénie, through her unsatisfying love attachment with her cousin. As is usual with Balzac, all the characters in the novel are fully realized. Balzac conceived his grand project, The Human Comedy, while writing Eugénie Grandet and incorporated it into the Comedie by revising the names of some of the characters in the second edition.
Money and its miseries
RAVI VYAS
"... the only god that anyone believes in nowadays - Money in all its power."
Honore De Balzac: Eugenie Grandet
MAY be it is the English Channel that has made all the difference! While the English have developed little taste for ideas disguised as literature - not much for ideas at all - the French have done even less for creative work without theories to support it. The literary inte
llectual has almost no public role in England unless he is also a novelist, poet or playwright, whereas in France a man's imaginative work seems to be not much more than a device for drawing attention to his ideas. The hero of Camus, The Fall remarks a little sourly. "It always seems to me that our fellow citizens had two passions: ideas and fornication," and adds, that in Paris even fornication had something abstract about it, like physical chess.
Honore De Balzac (1799-1850) could perhaps be described as one of the founders of this school that he established with The Human Comedy (1829-1850) - a long series of seventeen novels, a vast panorama of French life that ranged from country life to city from private life to politics, from military life to psychological studies. But it is the psychological make-up of his characters that have made his novels perennial classics - they are all of a piece represented with such power in their simplicity or rather single mindedness that they become vehicles for universal truths and the story of their lives contain an epic quality rather like the classical Greek tragedy where you see a scene and foretell the rest.
It is by no means easy to choose one or two novels from The Human Comedy. There is alw
ays a temptation to add one or two more for a better understanding why Balzac's works have lasted so long. Perhaps Eugenie Grandet best illustrates his characteristic methods and the secret of his genius and talent. It is a simple story of a family house in provincial Saumur in which lives a miser, Grandet with his wife and daughter Eugenie. Both suffer continuously under the stifling shadow of his obsession with gold. But the arrival of her cousin, Charles makes Eugenie's heart turn gently towards thoughts of love and marriage, if only to get away from the father. But Grandet opposes the marriage because so much of his outrageous gold would be carried away as dowry. The proposed marriage breaks down. Charles goes away to seek his fortunes in the east (he, too, is after money) and Eugenie is left alone to face the future on her own.
Quite obviously, a web of intrigue surrounds mother and daughter. A bunch of ambitious men and adventurers, careerists and speculators and misers of all kinds congregate, all attracted by the pale, cold glitter of gold. Part of Balzac's continuing success lies in his portrayal of these modern types of unscrupulous rascals and the mania they have for social climbing and fortune hunting which he was the first to portray in modern literature. "Moliere
created the miser but I have created Avarice," Balzac said when his work was compared to Moliere's Miser. Both are studies in avarice but there are two essential differences.
First, Balzac declared that his moral aim was to show the damage avarice does to the person himself, to the State and the fabric of society around him. Money-making is sordid business and he spares no detail of the sordidness and callousness that it engenders in human beings. The basic value of primitive accumulation was this: any one could aspire to any position provided he had the money and could get to know the right people. Every one was greedy to grab power, and money meant power. Success is what counts; and success equals money. The whole notion that money was dirty business was too antiquated and absurd (not to mention patronising) and had to be tossed aside. Balzac, chronicling the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in the mid-Nineteenth Century was the first to study the modern world, as we know it today.
The love of money and the passionate pursuit of it, studied in detail in the person of Grandet, is seen as a dynamic force in society. But the dynamics that infects all the charact
ers (except Eugenie and her mother) who are after the hand of rich heiress has an ugly face. Grandet is totally insensitive to the anguish of his daughter and, of course, his wife. Not once do his habitual expressions of greed and avarice turn into the lineaments of thought and conscience. All that mattered was the hoard of gold and if his own flesh and blood suffered because of that obsession, it was just too bad.
Balzac is interested in a psychological study of his characters to understand what made them what they are. But he is not interested in the complexities and subtleties of their minds, the discordant elements that fight for mastery in one human being. (Like Dostoevsky's characters do.) His characters, like Grandet, are pretty simple-minded. He is possessed with an overwhelming obsession, that gives rise to tragedy. Balzac's characters change under the impact of circumstances in the novel, as people change in real life. But the development of the characters - which is one of the principal things about any novel - is a developing weakness of their own innate nature. It is a cliche that stress brings out the best and worst in a human being; what it really brings out is the "man within".

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