The action takes place between 1811 and 1814 during the Napoleonic era.
It includes a father Sir William, and his wife, traders and drapers, whose only goal is to grow the family business. They run an iron hand everything that happens in their small shop, including the staff, but especially their two daughters. Pour Monsieur Guillaume, it is only a question of money, poetry and feelings are unknown to him. Only when everything is going to spoil his Augustine and Virginie girls reach the age to get married. One of them falls madly in love with a painter from the highest ranks of the nobility and the other married the chief clerk.
Two different beings so for two different destinies. Augustine will then confront the passionate love she is at a loss to channel and his marriage will gradually fall into ruin.
This is the story of a passionate love too quickly extinguished resulting in reflections on the compatibility between the passion of love and marriage.
One example among others: (p.79). "- Poor innocent, I will love you for your foolishness Know now that the more we love, the less we have to let see a man, especially a husband, the extent of our passion. The one who loves most is tyrannized, and, what is worse, neglected sooner or later. He who wants to rule must ...
-How Madame, he will therefore hide, calculate, become false, get an artificial one and forever? [...]
- Our power is fake So should we never let despise a man: it is only a matter of such a fall as odious maneuvers. Come, she added, 'I'll give you a way to put your husband in the chain. "
This literary gem is a real sociological sketch of the petty-bourgeois world trader of the nineteenth century although of course it is not worth 'Lost Illusions', the true masterpiece of Balzac. The author also shows in this new incompatibility see the impossibility of a marriage between two individuals from different social backgrounds. To quote that told Balzac Monsieur Guillaume, "a woman should marry a man of his class; we were always punished sooner or later have mounted too high; a husband who spoke Greek and Latin woman could die of hungry "(p.54).
In the paperback edition the preface is short but very informative about the origin of this new and its autobiographical interest. Augustine can be compared with the sister of Balzac, Laurence which was a bit the same fate. Pages bottom notes also help to understand the vocabulary of the nineteenth century unusual these days without overload the text.
