I just finished reading Eugénie Grandet; by Honoré de Balzac, a short novel published in 1833 and translated by Marion Ayton Crawford. This is only the second novel I’ve read by Balzac, and I wasn’t feeling deeply enmeshed in the story at first. Thankfully, I stuck with it and ended up loving the book. By the last third or so, I was absorbed with rapt concern and interest.

It is the story of Eugénie, a sheltered young woman and daughter of a man so consumed by cupidity that his fixation on gold rules the entirety of his life. The motivations of many of the characters in the story are deeply materialistic and selfish. This only highlights the traits embodied by Eugénie, her mother, and Nanon, their housekeeper, a woman of simple goodness.

The miserliness of Eugénie’s father is so severe that in less deft hands, his character may have come off cartoonish, but Balzac creates a convincing and tragic character. This is a story that begins with many possibilities, but the fates of characters seem to progressively constrict into the narrow confines of destiny brought about by qualities of individual nature and temperament, combined with the particulars of circumstance.