In Balzac's dazzling early novel, a Paris fabric shop displays a peculiar sign: a cat playing racquetball. The shop belongs to the respectable Matis family, whose narrow view of bourgeois propriety has kept them comfortable and blind to the world beyond their ledgers. Their daughter Augustine has been raised in this sheltered world, her imagination fed only by the patterns of silk and the quiet rhythm of the counting house. Then she meets a young man of aristocratic birth and artistic temperament, and everything changes. What unfolds is a poignant collision between social classes, between passion and propriety, between what is expected and what the heart demands. Balzac dissects the pain of love across the gulf of class with the precision of a surgeon and the tenderness of a poet. Here, in miniature, are the seeds of everything that would make the Human Comedy monumental: the observation of French society, the tension between money and lineage, the romantic's suffering in a world that demands compromise.
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