Monsieur Grandet’s nature
The author tries to portray Monsieur Grandet as precisely as possible, but notes of ironic attitude are traced within the entire novel. The most vivid irony concerns Grandet’s appearance. The author says: “though his manners were unctuous and soft outwardly, Monsieur Grandet’s nature was of iron. His dress never varied; and those who saw him to-day saw him such as he had been since 1791”. We see that Grandet is not a person of change, and his greed for money also never changed.
Politics as a business
During French Republic Grandet was considered a “bold man, a republican, and a patriot with a mind open to all the new ideas”, but Grandet was always interested only in commercial things. When he was appointed a member of the administration of Saumur “his pacific influence made itself felt politically and commercially”. “Politically, he protected the ci-devant nobles, and prevented, to the extent of his power, the sale of the lands and property of the emigres; commercially, he furnished the Republican armies with two or three thousand puncheons of white wine, and took his pay in splendid fields belonging to a community of women whose lands had been reserved for the last lot” – really only genius in the sphere of business can make things like these, and at the same time make a lot of money and save a good name in front of the inhabitants of Saumur.
Irony of life
Balzac was a famous mocker of French bourgeois society. The years of his life and work were ones of the most brilliant of bourgeois values, the society of the first part of the XIX century has almost gone to the top of its treachery of what was considered dearest hopes. The culture was coming to the point when the crisis of values was going to burst out. Balzac was writing at that very point of time.
The themes opened and developed in his novels are mostly concerned with money and religion. And on examples of two characters – Old Grandet and his daughter Eugenie we can traced how these two values are unable to satisfy one’s life. Grandet earned more and more money, he could not stop and be happy enough – money became his biggest happy and misery at the same time. As to Eugenie she does not value money so much, inner world is more important for her. She finds relief in religion, in inner peace. Eugenie falls in love with her cousin Charles, and she carries this love due to all postulates of Christianity, but we see that this does not bring her happiness either. Thus, Balzac foreshadows a crisis of common values which become unable to satisfy person’s hopes.
