Eugénie Grandet

This article is about the novel by the French writer Honoré de Balzac. Further meanings can be found under Eugénie Grandet (disambiguation) .

Eugénie Grandet is a novel by Honoré de Balzac . The original edition appeared in 1834. In Balzac's cycle of novels La Comédie humaine (Eng .: The human comedy ) , Eugénie Grandet is one of the Scènes de la vie de province (scenes from provincial life).

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The book is about the Grandet family who live in Saumur on the Loire. Father Grandet is one of the richest men in the area and is inhumanly stingy; all his striving and striving is for the preservation and increase of his property. The mother, his daughter Eugénie and the maid lead a quiet, joyless existence in his shadow.

The resident families Des Grassins and Cruchot intrigue for the fortune and want to marry off their sons to Eugénie. On her 23rd birthday, on which Lucienne des Grassins triumphs over the success of her son Adolphe with the heiress, Charles, Eugénie's cousin, comes to visit, who does not yet suspect that his father has committed suicide after his bankruptcy . Eugénie and her cousin fall in love, and the unworldly girl feels the wild joy of passion for the first time. But her father, who has no idea, does not intend to keep the useless eater in the house and sends Charles to India without a sou. Before that, however, Eugénie lends him her collection of coins that her father gave her for her birthdays.

When father Grandet finds out what has happened, he almost goes mad with anger - not for Eugenie's love, but for the sake of the lost money. Eugénie is locked in her room but believes Charles will return. Grandet, placed between greed and family honor, delays paying his brother's debts with great skill. Eugénie's house arrest is finally lifted. When her mother becomes ill with grief, Grandet persuades his daughter to renounce her inheritance; shortly afterwards her mother dies. And father Grandet dies too.

As sole heir to her father, Eugénie is now rich and courted, but continues to wait for Charles. The banker des Grassins, on business for Grandet in Paris, leaves his wife for a lady-in-law. From now on, Lucienne des Grassins heads the Bank in Saumur. She learns from her son Adolphe that Charles, having become wealthy and unscrupulous in India, has returned to France to marry a Parisian noblewoman. Eugenie, deprived of her only hope, sends him back his pawns of love and also pays his debts. A little later she marries the greedy M. Cruchot on the condition that he demands neither love nor passion from her. He dies a little later and leaves the entire inheritance to his wife.

Henceforth, Eugénie leads as a woman “who is out of this world in the middle of this world; who, created to be a wonderful mother and wife, has neither husband, nor children, nor family ”, a“ sacred, thrifty ”life in her gloomy house and seeks solace in charitable works.

expenditure

French

• Scenes de la vie de province. Tome I. Eugénie Grandet . L. Haumann, Bruxelles 1834.
  • later editions u. a. at Gallimard

German translations

• Eugénie Grandet . Rowohlt, Berlin (no year [1924]).
  • This translation was later revised by Diogenes, most recently in 2009, ISBN 978-3-257-23992-8
• Eugénie Grandet . Reclam, Stuttgart 1987, ISBN 3-15-050020-6 .
• Eugénie Grandet . Insel, Frankfurt a. M. / Leipzig 1997, ISBN 3-458-33822-5 .

Film adaptations

• 1921 - Eugénie Grandet ( The Conqering Power ) - directed by Rex Ingram - with Alice Terry , Rudolph Valentino
• 1946 Eugénie Grandet ( Eugenia Grandet ) - directed by Mario Soldati - with Alida Valli
• 1960 - Eugenie Grandet ( Yevgenia Grandet ) - Director: Sergei Alexejew
• 1994 - Eugénie Grandet - Director: Verhaeghe - with Alexandra London (Eugénie), Jean Carmet (Grandet), Jean-Claude Adelin (Charles), Dominique Labourier (Mme Grandet), Claude Jade (Lucienne des Grassins), Pierre Vernier (M. des Grassins), Olivier Delor (Adolphe des Grassins) a. a.

exhibition

• 2010: Louise Bourgeois : Moi, Eugénie Grandet. Maison de Balzac, Paris.

Web links

• Literature by and about Eugénie Grandet in the catalog of the German National Library
• Eugénie Grandet in the Gutenberg-DE project
• Eugénie Grandet. French full text at DigBib.org (PDF)
• Analysis by Eugénie Grandet at Biblioweb.org (French) ( Memento of October 11, 2006 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Greed is no way out. In: FAZ . January 5, 2010, p. 29.