Albert Savarus
1842
In the provinces of Restoration France, ambition and desire collide behind closed doors. Rosalie Watteville, the only daughter of a distinguished family in Besançon, finds herself trapped between her mother's social calculations and her own yearnings for something real. When the magnetic young lawyer Albert Savarus arrives in town, he seems to promise both passion and escape from her gilded cage. But Savarus harbors secrets that will shatter Rosalie's illusions about love and ambition. Balzac trains his surgical eye on the hidden warfare of provincial society: the quiet cruelties of status, the unpaid debts that bind families together, the way respectability masks ruthless self-interest. This is a novel about the small tyrannies of small towns, and the dreams that survive, or die, in their atmosphere. For those who relish Balzac's devastating portraits of French society, Albert Savarus offers a darker, more unsettling meditation on what it costs to rise.
