Avarice--Anger: Two of the Seven Cardinal Sins
In the shadowed streets of 19th-century Paris, a young woman named Mariette tends to her dying godmother, sacrificing her own youth and happiness to a life of poverty and devotion. Eugène Sue, the master of social fiction who shocked France with The Wandering Jew, crafts here a piercing portrait of love, sacrifice, and the moral compromises forced upon those who have nothing. When Mariette writes a desperate letter to her lover Louis, the scrivener who assists her begins to understand the weight of what poverty demands of the heart. The novel traces the two cardinal sins that lurk in the margins of desperate lives: avarice, the hunger that wealth creates even in those who have none, and anger, the bitterness that blooms when love and necessity collide. Sue exposes the brutal mathematics of poverty in Belle Epoque Paris, where even virtue becomes a casualty of survival.
