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Der Roman, der Fjodor Dostojewskij so sehr gefiel, dass er ihn ins Russische übersetzte: Der alte Grandet ist der Geiz in Person, er luchst sogar noch der eigenen Tochter ihr Erbteil ab. Als er dann stirbt, erbt Eugénie ein Millionenvermögen, wird von allen Seiten umworben, kann aber doch ihre Chance nicht beim Schopf packen.

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´´ Me have that golden gown!´´

A blameless girl and her monstrous relatives clash over love and money in Balzac´s matchless portrayal of greed in a French provincial town.

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The son of a civil servant, Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.

Balzac was born in 1799, the son of a civil servant. At the age of thirty - heavily in debt and with an unsucessful past behind him - he started work on the first of what were to become a total of ninety novels and short stories that make up The Human Comedy. He died in 1850.

M. A. Crawford has translated many of Balzac´s novels for the Penguin Classics

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