Finished: The Firm of Nucingen (de Balzac). Interesting little book. :-) De Balzac's big tour de force was that he started grouping all his books together and called them all collectively...La Comedie Humaine. So, within any given de Balzac book you can come across the same characters. Sometimes they might just get a mention; other times they are peripheral characters; and then occasionally they are the main characters. When I read Eugenie Grandet, I really loved that book! In researching Honore de Balzac I saw that he had grouped most of his books into areas of his La Comedie Humaine according to things like the provincial life, or the Parisian life, etc. Eugenie Grandet was from "The Scenes of Provincial Life" group. Lost Illusions, his second book I read, and probably his most well known, was in a classification all its own. In Lost Illusions we got a brief glimpse of a character named Eugene de Rastignac.

Eugene de Rastignac is a nobleman who has grown up rather poor, but he is willing to do nearly anything to propel himself to the heights of society. As a matter of fact....because of de Balzac's character Eugene de Rastignac, it is a common term in French today to call a social climber a "Rastignac". Anyway...in Lost Illusions, when he crosses paths with that book's protagonist, Lucien Chardon, Rastignac has already made his way up the society ladder and he snubs Lucien's attempts to follow in his footsteps. So...I decided that the next two books of de Balzac's that I wanted to read were to be about Eugene de Rastignac. I bought Le Pere Goriot and The Firm of Nucingen. Le Pere Goriot will actually be my first introduction to the Rastignac character as an up and coming twenty-one year old. I read The Firm of Nucingen first because it sounded intriguing, and it was shorter. :-)

The Firm of Nucingen opens with two men having dinner in a French restaurant with just a mere flimsy divider between themselves and the next dining room. They talk in low voices so no one can hear them, but as far as they can tell, there is no one else in the other dining room...until...four robust young dandies come in to have dinner and boisterously gossip about France, people well-known in France...and finally their own friends! Intrigued, the two original guests decide to sit quietly and eavesdrop on the conversation. What ensues is the lively telling by Bixiou, the most outrageous character, of how Eugene de Rastignac came to have 400,000 francs to live off of and how it involved the nefarious Baron de Nucingen, who is married to Delphine de Nucingen, the daughter of the father character in Le Pere Goriot, who Rastignac has fallen for. Nucingen encourages Rastignac's platonic relationship with his wife, as it gives him more time to do his wheelings and dealings. The book is full of talk about stock, finances, interest, and money manipulation that ruins many acquaintances of Nucingen's...but not Rastignac. He's in on the inside knowledge and ends up making his money at the expense of other people losing theirs.

The book is a short, funny at times, quick-paced conversation between the four young men which tells the history of quite a few characters...all done up in male gossip! I always knew guys really did talk about people just like girls, hee hee. Anyway...even though this book took place chronologically after Le Pere Goriot, I'm now going to dive into that book and see how Eugene and Delphine first meet up. :-) Below is a snippet of Bixiou talking about a Baroness who is the mother of two eligible young society ladies that Rastignac knows:

"An only daughter and an heiress, spoilt by her father and mother, spoilt by her husband and the city of Strasbourg, spoilt still by two daughters who worshiped their mother, the Baroness d'Aldrigger indulged a taste for rose color, short petticoats, and a knot of ribbon at the point of the tightly-fitting corselet bodice. Any Parisian meeting the Baroness on the boulevard would smile and condemn her outright; he does not admit any plea of extenuating circumstances, like a modern jury on a case of fratricide. A scoffer is always superficial, and in consequence cruel; the rascal never thinks of throwing the proper share of ridicule on society that made the individual what he is; for Nature only makes dull animals of us, we owe the fool to artificial conditions."