. . . the chance meeting of a renowned painter and a mysterious girl blossoms into love, but when their ensuing courtship is marred by the disappearance of a purse full of money, their newfound happiness threatens to unravel . . . to the north of Paris in the port city of Le Havre, a drama of love and deception unfolds when the last and fiercely guarded daughter of a once prosperous family falls in love with the verses of a famous poet, but is this great man of letters with whom she enters into an impassioned correspondence really the person she believes him to be? . . . The theme of reality versus illusion, particularly in matters of love, dominates the two works of this second volume (The Purse and Modeste Mignon) of Balzac's magnum opus. Left unfinished at the time of the writer's death, La Comedie Humaine is a vast literary undertaking composed of some hundred short stories, novellas, and novels set in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. Throughout, Balzac utilizes nineteenth century French society to examine humanity and the human experience with all its attendant virtues, vices, and peculiarities.

On a coach ride between towns, a callow young man gets caught up in a round of tale-telling with his fellow passengers and ends up committing an indiscretion that will take a lifetime to undo . . . In the town of Besancon, a cloistered young girl reads a romance penned by a mysterious newcomer and schemes to take the place of the story's real-life inspiration: a beautiful Italian duchess . . . Two lovers stand in defiance of the age-old feud that has decimated their families: a vendetta that even Napoleon Bonaparte himself may be powerless to stop . . . Beginning again in life, whether in one's profession, or, to a lesser extent, for the purpose of concealing one's identity, is the theme that unifies the three stories (A Start in Life, Albert Savarus, and The Vendetta) in this volume of The Human Comedy. Left unfinished at the time of Balzac's death, La Comedie Humaine is a vast literary undertaking composed of some hundred short stories, novellas, and novels set in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. Throughout, Balzac utilizes nineteenth century French society to examine humanity and the human experience with all its attendant virtues, vices, and peculiarities. The third volume of Noumena Press's Human Comedy features detailed background information on each of the stories, 27 illustrations, more than 60 pages of annotations, and two appendices that contain "Journey by Coucou" by Laure Surville (Balzac's sister) and "Mateo Falcone" by Prosper Merimee--stories that were the inspiration for Balzac's A Start in Life and The Vendetta, respectively. "Journey by Coucou" appears in English translation here for the first time. Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was one of France's most prolific and influential authors. In his lifetime, he worked as a legal clerk, publisher, printer, businessman, and even ran for political office. Failing in all these endeavors, he was nonetheless able to make use of these experiences in his writing to create some of the most memorable stories and characters in French literature.

Obermann, first published in 1804, is the best known work of French writer Etienne Pivert de Senancour. Usually described as an epistolary novel, the letters that constitute this volume are much closer to being a series of interlinked essays. Supposedly written by the melancholy recluse Obermann, whom critics have generally seen as a thinly disguised stand-in for Senancour himself, the letters contain the emotional outpourings of a man forever searching the depths of his innermost self in the hopes of overcoming his despair and finding a place for himself in the world, yet never quite succeeding. The letters cover a multitude of topics such as the hypocritical morals of the time, the failings of religion, the poor treatment of women in society, and the futility of existence. But while these writings are always overshadowed by an inescapable sense of brooding and pessimism, there are also passages that contain striking descriptions of Obermann's Alpine refuge that are almost mystical in their sense of union with nature. The work is similar in some respects to Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, his Confessions, the Essays of Montaigne, and even to Thoreau's Walden, yet it is wholly original in its form, and there is nothing else quite like it in the history of French literature. Though virtually unknown in America and largely forgotten in France, Obermann should nonetheless be seen as an essential text of early Romanticism whose rightful place is next to Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and Chateaubriand's Rene.