Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau
1837
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau
1837
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
Honoré de Balzac understood debt the way doctors understand disease, by intimate, painful experience. He wrote this novel from the inside out, and it shows. César Birotteau is a respectable Paris perfumer whose appointment as deputy-mayor unlocks a dangerous confidence. He decides to host a magnificent ball to celebrate, and to expand his business into a grand speculative venture. But ambition, unmoored from means, becomes a kind of madness. His former employee du Tillet, fired for embezzlement, nurses a grudge and works methodically to bring Birotteau down. When the crash comes, it comes hard. What follows is a portrait of a man watching his entire world dissolve: the shop, the status, the pride. Yet Balzac, generous as ever, provides a lifeline in Anselme Popinot, Birotteau's daughter's suitor, a brilliant young marketer who fights to recover what can be recovered. The question at the novel's heart is whether a ruined man can rebuild his honor, and whether the effort matters more than the outcome.
