The Duchess of Langeais and The Girl with Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac (two novellas-Components of The Human Comedy)

The Duchess of Langeais 1834, translated by Ellen Marriage

The Girl with the Golden Eyes 1835, translated by Ellen Marriage

Parts Two and Three of a trilogy, Histoire Destraeize

The Duchess of Langeais is really not that great a work.  I can see Balzac writing this as fast as humanly possible following a formula he knows will sell, romantic troubles of the one percent of France in the 1830s.  It centers on a general who falls in love with a duchess and his efforts to locate her. It also brings into play an occult order of the free masons.  

The Girl with the Golden Eyes is a very odd book.  It begins with a twenty page or so diatribe explaining why the citizens of Paris are overall so ugly.  It is an interesting account of the vices and foibles of Parisian society.  One wonders what might have motivated Balzac to include this.  The rest of the novella is pretty much a Balzacian omlet of weird colonial prejuduces, Orientalism  so silly as to be almost comic and a bizzare romance.  There are sexual obsessions,  murder plots and occult elements.   

36/91

The Human Comedy consists of 25 short stories, 25 novellas, and 41 novels.  

I have now begun Albert Savarus and it starts off very well. 

Mel u