In the first paragraph of his novel Pere Goriot, Balzac describes his primary setting, the Maison Vauquer, as a "respectable establishment" that has never been sullied by any "breath of scandal" (1). This statement significantly defines the house...

In her towering box at the fashionable opera house, Mme de Beausant "was scanning the theatre with her opera-glasses, and though apparently taking no notice of Madame de Nucingen, did not miss her slightest move" (112). The vicomtesse, as though...

Throughout most of human history, it has been difficult or even impossible to change social classes. Those born into poverty tended to remain there as slaves or peasants, and wealth tended to remain concentrated in the hands of the hereditary...

Through ‘Le Père Goriot’ Honoré de Balzac explores the antithetical nature of several ideals: love and wealth, social status and happiness, rebellion and obedience, and – what a reader may find to be the most intriguing – morality and success....

Honore De Balzac's Cousin Bette is a novel about obsession, but what makes the premise so fantastic is the manner in which each obsession is related to the others. The characters are obsessed with art, but the bourgeois universe of post-Napoleonic...