The Balzac Collection - Volume 10

Four works, four territories, one relentless intelligence.

A mysterious stranger boards a storm-threatened ferry from Cadzand to Ostend and is welcomed only by the poor - and then a writer sits alone in a ruined Parisian church and asks what it means, in the modern world, to believe the legend he has just told. A fabric salesman in Paris practices the most demanding of arts: knowing what a customer wants before she does, and supplying it with a precision that leaves her certain the choice was entirely her own. A French soldier lost in the Sahara discovers a sleeping panther in a desert cave, names her Mignonne, and finds himself constructing something that the available categories of feeling cannot quite describe. And in Issoudun, a town in the Berry, two brothers arrive from Paris to save an old man's inheritance from the people systematically stripping it away - and discover that provincial intrigue is as ruthless as any battlefield, and that the brother most equal to it is the one the wars have made capable of anything.

This tenth volume of the Balzac Collection brings together Jesus Christ in Flanders, Gaudissart II, A Passion in the Desert, and A Bachelor's Household - four works from La Comédie humaine that demonstrate, in their range of register and subject, why Balzac's project remains unlike anything else in the nineteenth century: not a survey of French society but a reckoning with it, conducted with a honesty about human nature that neither sentimentality nor cynicism was permitted to soften.

These are not comfortable works. They are complete ones.