Balzac's Miser
This is an excerpt from the novel that illustrates
Balzac’s perception:-
“A miser’s life is a constant exercise of every
human faculty in the service of his own personality. He considers only two
feelings, vanity and self-interest; but as the achievement of his interest
supplies to some extent a concrete and tangible tribute to his vanity, as it is
a constant attestation of his real superiority, his vanity and the study of his
advantage are two aspects of one passion – egotism. That is perhaps the reason
for the amazing curiosity excited by misers skillfully presented upon the
stage. Everyone has some link with these persons, who revolt all human feelings
and yet epitomize them. Where is the man without ambition? And what ambition
can be attained in our society without money?.......
Like all misers he had a constant need to pit his
wits against those of other men, to mulct them of their crowns by fair legal
means. To get the better of others, was that not exercising power, giving
oneself with each new victim the right to despise those weaklings of the earth
who were unable to save themselves from being devoured? Oh! Has anyone properly
understood the meaning of the lamb lying peacefully at God’s feet - that most
touching symbol of all the victims of this world - and of their future, the
symbol of which is suffering and weakness glorified? The miser lets the lamb
grow fat, then he pens, kills, cooks, eats and despises it. Misers thrive on
money and contempt.”
In the novel, Felix Grandet is depicted as the
stingy, egotistic and mean-spirited money hoarder in suburban France against a
money-grubbing social backdrop with the rise of the bourgeoisie. He rations
everyday food for his weak-minded wife, his only daughter Eugenie and his loyal
house servant, and purposely keeps his house in shabby disrepair, while making
immense fortunes secretively. He almost seems to derive sadistic pleasure in
ruling his domestic household with an iron fist.
The only two persons who have
knowledge of his true worth are his lawyer and his banker. Knowing that these
two are trying to get their nephew/son to win the hand of Eugenie, he plays off
one against the other to draw the greatest monetary advantage. He employs
devious means to cheat and benefit from his deceased brother’s creditors and insists
on Eugenie breaking romantic ties with his nephew Charles, who is left
penniless by his deceased father’s bankruptcy. Charles is forced to go off to
the Indies to find his fortune and Eugenie gives him all her gold coins that
her father has given her over the years, to the miser’s furious dismay.
When he
comes back to France a rich man, having made his fortune from dealing in
slaves, he forsakes Eugenie for an aristocrat, mistaken that she is poor.
Eugenie,
by nature a kind-hearted country girl, after experiencing the heartbreaking end
to her love story and getting to know about her father’s deeds, becomes a
skeptic as she learns about the hypocrisy and shallowness of the bourgeois
class. She later inherits both her father’s and husband’s fortunes (the husband
being the lawyer’s nephew, who dies shortly after their loveless marriage) and
lives on her own terms.
The loud and clear
message in the novel is how avarice (in the case of Felix Grandet) and
materialism (in the case of Charles) can corrupt the soul. Isn’t the essence of
the story in constant replay in our money-idolizing societies, East and West,
that have blind faith in unbridled capitalism?