The Girl with the Golden Eyes - Paperback

by Honoré de Balzac (Author), Carol Cosman (Translator), Robert Alter (Introduction by)

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."

Author Biography

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, was born in Tours and educated at the Collège Vendôme and the Sorbonne. He began his career as a pseudonymous writer of sensational potboilers before achieving success with a historical novel, The Chouans. Balzac then conceived his great work, The Human Comedy, an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years, including such masterpieces as Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette. In 1850, he married Eveline Hańska, a rich Polish woman with whom he had long conducted an intimate correspondence. Three months later he died. In addition to The Girl with the Golden Eyes, NYRB Classics publishes The Human Comedy: Selected Stories, The Lily in the Valley, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, and The Unknown Masterpiece.

Carol Cosman translated numerous French books over a range of genres--fiction, biography, memoirs, history, and philosophy. In addition to her translation of short fiction by Balzac, her English version of Jean-Paul Sartre's three-thousand-page The Family Idiot is especially noteworthy.

Robert Alter is an emeritus professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written widely on the European novel, particularly Balzac and Flaubert, and is the author of a critical biography of Stendhal. He lives in Berkeley.