Description
audible1 recording of The Ball at Sceaux by Honoré de Balzac. (Translated by Clara Bell.)
Read in English by Bruce Pirie
The novella “The Ball at Sceaux” is part of Balzac’s great life work — the expansive fiction series titled “The Human Comedy.”
The central character is Émilie de Fontaine, youngest daughter of a noble but impoverished family in post-revolutionary France. Her hapless father hopes to find her a good marriage, but Émilie, spoiled and willful, has repeatedly turned away suitors. She has a list of requirements for any prospective husband, one of which is that he must, of course, be “the son of a peer of France.” (The peerage was an elite aristocratic distinction.) She holds firm to this resolve, but events have a way of turning out surprisingly.
Balzac was a master of irony and realism and his writings were hugely influential in the development of European fiction. – Summary by Bruce Pirie
