The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac

In this influential novella, regarded as one of Balzac’s greatest works, a dissolute aristocrat competes with a shadowy rival for the love of an enigmatic golden-eyed woman—a crazed and annihilating conflict that plays out in the most darkly decadent corners of Parisian high society.

A handsome, brilliant, consummate hedonist, Henri de Marsay believes in neither man nor woman, neither God nor the devil. He believes in Paris, a city of decadence and sin, a city where every passion is resolved into gold or pleasure.

From the first moment Henri catches sight of the girl, he is infatuated. And so is she. Though closely guarded by a stern chaperone, she manages to brush against him in the street and squeeze his hand. Desperate for another glimpse of this "woman of fire," Henri returns every day to where he last saw her until he learns her name, Paquita Valdes, and her address, a forbidding mansion on the Rue Saint-Lazare protected by vicious dogs. Penetrating this palace becomes Henri's obsession. He makes elaborate plans and enlists the help of a secret society, the Devorants, but when at last he enters, he learns a bitter truth not only about the girl but about his own half-sister. His erotic quest ends in bloodshed.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes is one of the most memorable and fantastic episodes in Balzac's Human Comedy—its dark vision of Paris and human sexuality an inspiration to Oscar Wilde in Salomé and to Marcel Proust, whose Baron de Charlus praises its author for his knowledge "even of those passions which the rest of the world ignores, or studies only to castigate them."

REVIEWS

"The Girl with the Golden Eyes is a truly audacious story, as Proust claimed: it opens to literary representation same-sex love generally kept in the closet or underworld."—Peter Brooks

“Perfectly contemporaneous with its era and timeless in its understanding of social snakes and ladders . . . the story escalates beautifully with surprises for all, destructive passions of all kinds and there’s even room for a black joke in the final line. Like 19th-century engineers, they built stories to last back then.” —John Self, The Critic (UK)

PRODUCT DETAILS
Paperback
Publisher: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 978-1681379067
Pages:  112