Honore de Balzac

Albert Savarus Honore de Balzac

Wonderful tale set in the provincial town of Besancon, and focussing on the de Watteville family - the fiercely religious and independently wealthy wife, the ineffectual husband, who absents himself, spending his days working his lathe...and 19-year-old daughter, Rosalie. A colourless and insignificant young person, carefully brought up by Mama, so that 'at seventeen Rosalie had never read anything but the Lettres Edifiantes and some works on heraldry', she nonetheless has an unbending mind of her own, most particularly in her resolve never to marry the man her mother intends her for. When the intriguing Albert Savarus - a successful, but mysterious, lawyer and later newspaper editor - arrives in town, Rosalie hears of him at dinner parties and becomes obsessed with him. But her seemingly unimportant manoeuvres ('all the time she was pondering these machinations, the extraordinary girl was working slippers for her father with the most innocent air in the world') have a massive outcome...