The Jealousies of a Country Town

Two connected novels set in the fictional town of Alencon anatomize the feuds of provincial France after the Revolution. The Old Maid watches an aging spinster’s fortune become the prize in a rivalry between a faded royalist and a self-made republican, each courting her for very different reasons. The Collection of Antiquities follows the d’Esgrignon family, proud old nobility clinging to vanished prestige, and their charming, dishonest heir Victurien, whose Paris debts and forgeries threaten to drag the house down. Balzac maps the resentments dividing old aristocracy from the rising middle class, and the way private jealousies come to decide public fates. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.