On a lovely spring morning in the year 1829, a man of fifty or thereabouts was wending his way on horseback along the mountain road that leads to a large village near the Grande Chartreuse. This village is the market town of a populous canton that lies wi

The volume of short stories which, in the first complete edition of the Comedie, opens with Les Marana, contains, with that in which La Recherche de l'Absolu leads off, the very finest productions of the author on a small scale; and they now appear together, La Recherche excepted. Almost all the pieces herein contained were early work, written when Balzac was under the combined excitement of his emergence from the valley of the shadow in which he had toiled so long, and of the heat and stress of the political and literary Revolution of 1830...

The volume of short stories which, in the first complete edition of the Comedie, opens with Les Marana, contains, with that in which La Recherche de l'Absolu leads off, the very finest productions of the author on a small scale; and they now appear together, La Recherche excepted. Almost all the pieces herein contained were early work, written when Balzac was under the combined excitement of his emergence from the valley of the shadow in which he had toiled so long, and of the heat and stress of the political and literary Revolution of 1830...

It was you who led me to understand the marvelous framework of ideas on which the great Italian poet built his poem, the only work which the moderns can place by that of Homer. Till I heard you, the Divine Comedy was to me a vast enigma to which none had found the clue--the commentators least of all. Thus, to understand Dante is to be as great as he; but every form of greatness is familiar to you.

Balzac's literary output began with chronicles and sketches on widely varied social and artistic topics. The journals to which he contributed were increasingly looking for short fiction, which Balzac was able to provide. A collection Scenes de la vie privee (Scenes from Private Life) came out in 1829, and was well received: these were tales told with a journalistic eye which looked into the fabric of modern life and did not shun social and political realities. Balzac had found a distinctive voice.

The Girl with the Golden Eyes is part of the History of the Thirteen trilogy written by Honora de Balzac. Balzac was the first writer to write about the social scene France. The introduction tells of urban and economic life in Paris. The story is set is a fine mansion on the Rue Saint-Lazare, where a man becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman. The paradoxical twists in this story come to a conclusion with a wrenching finality.