Balzac began his career as a novelist with pseudonymously published historical novels in imitation of >> Sir Walter Scott but, as he turned to fiction with a contemporary setting, he gradually evolved a grandly ambitious plan to write a series of novels which would provide a panoramic portrait of French society in the first half of the 19th century. La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy), as he entitled the whole project, was never finished but, even so, it runs to more than 90 individual but interconnected works of fiction which together include thousands of characters. Eugénie Grandet, one of the earliest novels in the series, is set in the stifling household of Monsieur Grandet, a wealthy but miserly wine merchant in the French provincial town of Saumur. Grandet controls the life of his submissive and naïve daughter, Eugénie, whom he plans to marry off to his advantage rather than hers; she, however, falls in love with her penniless cousin Charles. But Charles proves as worthless a man as her father. Despatched to the West Indies to make his fortune, he soon forgets his promises to Eugénie and when he returns, rich from dealings in the slave trade, he chooses to marry for social position rather than love. 

Eugénie’s hopes for emotional fulfilment have been ruined by the greed of both her father and her one-time suitor. Balzac’s huge cycle of novels contains many other brilliant depictions of everyday tragedies like Eugénie’s. Old Goriot, for example, tells the Lear-like story of an old man living in a down-at-heel Parisian boarding house who sacrifices his all for his two married daughters. In return they treat him with contempt and offhand neglect. However, none of Balzac’s books possesses quite the power to touch and move the reader as Eugénie Grandet, with its tale of blighted love and the baleful power of money.