In the cutthroat financial markets of Restoration Paris, a wizened usurer named Gobseck amasses a fortune from the desperate aristocracy. When Countess Anastasie de Restaud, the same woman who once turned her dying father Goriot away, finds herself drowning in debt, she must bargain with the very monster her family helped create. Gobseck's ledgers know no mercy, they record only principal, interest, and the precise value of every diamond, every secret, every lie. Balzac conducts a precise autopsy on a society that has replaced honor with installments, lineage with leverage. This compact, savage novella operates like a post-mortem on the French aristocracy: the body is still breathing, but everyone can already smell the decay. It endures because it reveals the fundamental transaction at the heart of bourgeois and noble Paris, everything has a price, and everyone is for sale.
X-Ray
