The Art of the Novella

Her mouth was almost pressed against his, and her words were like quick, hurried kisses: "You must absolutely go through with the duel tomorrow." An absorbing saga about the brutalities of military life upon its own soldiers. Stranded at a distant outpost, young Romashov finds himself obliged to fight a duel--over something he realizes is meaningless. As the novel hurtles toward a startling conclusion, it reveals itself to be a luminous depiction of the end of an era.

Quel peut être le destin d'une petite servante dans la campagne normande du XIXe siècle ? C'est cette vie "minuscule", ses espoirs, ses rêves, ses épreuves que Flaubert nous invite à partager. Et, sans nul doute, le visage de Félicité continuera de nous hanter une fois le livre achevé car ce "coeur simple" renferme ces douleurs secrètes qui sont aussi les nôtres.

George Eliot's Gothic story, published the same year as her staunchly realist novel, Adam Bede, continues her preoccupation with human communication and sympathy through the figure of the telepathic narrator. Latimer, one of her least likeable characters, suffers tremendously under his heightened awareness of others' petty and selfish thoughts. Latimer chooses to tell the story of his abilities as a tale of disability, a kind of pathography about his gift. The vehemence of his disgust for human frailties suggests that Latimer's pain derives at least in part from his failure of empathy for others (except at his father's death)--that his discomfort with telepathic communication rests on his resistance to human connection in general. Thus, his uncanny hearing unmasks a kind of sympathetic deafness to others, and his progressive heart disease indexes the shriveling of his capacity for human love and friendship.

It is in the Tuileries, just outside the Cafe des Feuillants, that Henri de Marsay first catches sight of the girl with the golden eyes and can almost believe in love. Haunted by her shimmery image, returning daily to the Tuileries for another glimpse of her dark beauty, he learns her name - Paquita Valdes - and discovers her address. But a fairy-tale princess has never been more inaccessibly locked in a tower as has Paquita in a mansion on the Rue Saint-Lazare. Vowing conquest, Henri de Marsay elaborately plots his seduction of the girl with the golden eyes, but with his sensual triumph comes the bitter revelation that he has a powerful rival for the love of Paquita - the Marquise de San-Real, his own half-sister. A cry of vengeance and the call of blood bring Balzac's taut exploration of the dark side of Parisian society in this novella from his trilogy, History of the Thirteen, to its unexpected if inevitable end.