The Girl with the Golden Eyes - Honore de Balzac
Even in a novella La Fille aux yeux d'or Balzac feels the necessity for a long setup. He will tax our patience by painstakingly delineating place, time, social class, and a common example of that class. The first dozen pages or so sets teeming Paris as a pressure cooker and describes an amoral class of spongers and hedonists. As an exemplar of such is the decadent libertine, Henri de Marsay.
He's a man about town, good-looking enough to attract all the bored women he can handle. He meets Paquita Valdez who lives in a world of sexual slavery and violence that unnerves even cynical Hank. Strangely - wouldn't he expect she had other arrangements for the sake of short-term pleasure and long-term security? - he is furious when he finds out that he's only the good time boy she uses for exercise when she's not with her real sugar daddy.
Bent on avenging this blow to his honor, such as it is, he visits her house with murder on his mind. I'm not telling more.
Balzac is totally over the top, making us understand and sympathize with parents who tore his novels out of the unsullied hands of their daughters. Balzac constantly horns in to tell us readers things that we assume or can already guess. He detests and decries society’s insatiable yen for more money. His prose is sweaty, his pace puffing. It's all rather endearing.
His novels burn me out but the novellas are a lot of fun
for us cheerful vulgarians.
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