seemed to me to lose something in its translation from French to English, as though the original text was populated by subtle plays on words and innuendoes that were simply lost, er, in translation. Ugh. Sorry about that.It's a gorgeous web Balzac weaves though. The plot is delicious. And here it is, in short form.
One father sires two children. He believes the second, a daughter, to be the product of his wife's infidelity and sends the ill-begotten spawn away. His first child, a son, is a dunce. The father dies and leaves his idiot son a fortune. Meanwhile, his daughter has two sons of her own: her first son is an ambitious, evil bastard and her second son is a pure-hearted artist. Her first son is her true love but even she realizes his true nature after he steals money and is generally a petty, selfish dickhead.
But that's the thing about petty, selfish dickheads. They're predictable. And Balzac counts on it.
The daughter, realizing that she's in a tight financial spot because of her son's dickheadedness decides to call on her dunce brother for a piece of the family fortune. But, her dunce of a brother is being swindled from within his own home, having fallen in love with a peasant girl. The girl is in love with a rogue from town who wants to take the dunce's fortune and is set to do exactly that. The rogue is far too clever for the daughter and her good son who fall prey to his manipulations and leave town penniless and shamed.
But the daughter's dickheaded son is just the match for the rogue. He finds himself in a position to take on the girl and the rogue and he uses his innate dickheadedness to win the day, to swindle the swindler. This is the brilliance of Balzac's plot. He uses an evil character to screw over another evil character and it's fabulous!
So the dickheaded son screws over the girl and her rogue. He gets the fortune. And then he's done in by his own dickheadedness and the fortune falls to the daughter's good son, the pure-hearted artist that Balzac clearly wanted us to adore from the start. So the plot comes full circle, good people are rewarded and evil plays its part in bringing about a happy ending.
It took me a good 150 pages to warm up to the plot but once I realized what Balzac was doing, I was enthralled. It's slow and plodding. You need patience to get into it and even then, the idea of the plot may be better than the actual application.
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