The Girl with the Golden Eyes
1835
Henri de Marsay, a young Parisian dandy of savage appetites, becomes fixated on a mysterious woman he glimpses in the Tuileries Gardens: Paquita, a creature with tiger-gold eyes and a past shrouded in shadow. She belongs to no ordinary world, she is kept by a monstrous wealthy man, surrounded by danger and secrets. What begins as pursuit becomes obsession, then something darker: a reckoning with desire itself, and with the corruption that money and power can breed in the human heart. Balzac constructs his Paris as a jungle where beauty is prey and passion is a game no one plays cleanly. The novella crackles with erotic tension, social satire, and psychological unease. It is short, but it cuts deep. For all its 19th-century setting, it reads like a warning about what happens when consumption becomes love, and beauty becomes currency.
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“True love rules especially through memory.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“There everything is tolerated: the government and the guillotine, religion and the cholera. You are always acceptable to this world, you will never be missed by it. What, then, is the dominating impulse in this country without morals, without faith, without any sentiment, wherein, however, every sentiment, belief, and moral has its origin and end? It is gold and pleasure. Take””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Only, the working-man dies in hospital when the last term of his stunted growth expires; whereas the man of the middle class is set upon living, and lives on, but in a state of idiocy. You””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Were it not for the cabarets, would not the Government be overturned every Tuesday? Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off its pleasure, is penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread, stimulated by a need of material procreation, which has become a habit to it. None””
— Honoré de Balzac
“A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages”
— Honoré de Balzac
“A force de s'intéresser à tout, le Parisien finit par ne s'intéresser à rien.””
— Honoré de Balzac
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-girl-with-the-golden-eyes-7ee4c031-fdb8-4ae2-b8f0-d2cf12029120"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-girl-with-the-golden-eyes-7ee4c031-fdb8-4ae2-b8f0-d2cf12029120)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-girl-with-the-golden-eyes-7ee4c031-fdb8-4ae2-b8f0-d2cf12029120][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-girl-with-the-golden-eyes-7ee4c031-fdb8-4ae2-b8f0-d2cf12029120Cite this book
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Balzac, Honoré de. The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-girl-with-the-golden-eyes-7ee4c031-fdb8-4ae2-b8f0-d2cf12029120.Balzac, H. D. (1835). The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-girl-with-the-golden-eyes-7ee4c031-fdb8-4ae2-b8f0-d2cf12029120Balzac, Honoré de. The Girl with the Golden Eyes. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-girl-with-the-golden-eyes-7ee4c031-fdb8-4ae2-b8f0-d2cf12029120.
