Novel: Eugénie Grandet

Setting and Premise
Balzac sets Eugénie Grandet in the Loire town of Saumur, where stone streets, church bells, and the draughty, ancient house of the Grandets create a claustrophobic stage for a drama of avarice and innocence. Félix Grandet, a former cooper turned landowner, has amassed a secret fortune through shrewd purchases and pitiless thrift. His wife, meek and sickly, and his daughter, the gentle Eugénie, live under his tyrannical economy with the loyal servant Nanon. Around the family hover two rival clans, the Cruchots and the des Grassins, who court the heiress on behalf of their respective sons and offices, calculating the dowry they imagine behind Grandet’s barred cupboards.

Plot Summary
On Eugénie’s birthday, the Parisian cousin Charles Grandet arrives without warning, bearing fashionable clothes and urban manners. His father, a speculator, has gone bankrupt and then killed himself, leaving Charles disgraced and destitute. In a single stroke, Charles’s arrival disrupts the provincial chess game: Eugénie discovers love, and Père Grandet discovers a chance to profit. He coldly decides to ship the young man off to the Indies to make his fortune, while conspiring to buy up his brother’s liabilities for a pittance to enhance his own holdings.

During the brief, tender interlude before Charles leaves, Eugénie and he pledge themselves. In secret, she gives him her small hoard of gold pieces, cherished New Year’s gifts saved since childhood, so he can begin anew. Grandet discovers the gift and erupts. He locks his daughter in an unheated room and imposes a regimen of deprivation as punishment for the one extravagance born of love. Madame Grandet, broken by stress and neglect, falls ill and dies, leaving Eugénie spiritually orphaned yet resolute in her silent defiance.

Years pass in the cold glow of gold. Grandet continues to hoard, weighing his louis and listening to their chime like a miser’s music, and consolidates power in Saumur. Eugénie keeps faith with her absent cousin, living austerely, embodying virtue in a household ruled by greed. When Grandet finally dies, à la Balzac, the estate reveals its magnitude: vineyards, houses, rentes, and above all cash. Eugénie becomes one of the richest women in the province.

Betrayal and Aftermath
From overseas commerce Charles returns transformed, not to Saumur, but to himself, hardened by trade and ambition. He seeks a marriage that will buy him a title through alliance with the d’Aubrion family. In a cold letter he renounces his vows to Eugénie and asks, with the tact of a calculator, for the settlement of his late father’s debts to cleanse his name. Eugénie, wounded yet steadfast, uses her fortune to pay the creditors in full with interest, redeeming the honor he has treated as mere capital. She then accepts marriage to the President de Bonfons, a Cruchot kinsman, less from passion than from duty and social inevitability.

Widowed after a few years, Eugénie emerges the wealthiest figure in Saumur. She returns to a life of charity and modesty in the same austere house, queen of the town yet living as a nun might, faithful not to Charles but to an ideal of goodness that money cannot corrupt.

Themes
The novel opposes love to money, revealing how gold shapes destinies in both Paris and the provinces. Père Grandet’s avarice is not comic but tyrannical, a domestic despotism that freezes feeling. Eugénie’s generosity stands as its moral counterweight, yet her virtue is not rewarded with happiness. Balzac anatomizes provincial society’s calculations, the complicity of notaries, bankers, and suitors, and the way social ambition transforms people, Charles above all, into instruments of gain. The result is a stark portrait of how the worship of wealth impoverishes the heart.