Eugenie no longer protested. She received and gave the
purest, sweetest, but also the entirest of all kisses."
The foregoing and others, equally well drawn, are figures in the
background. Standing out in front of them, and in lurid relief, is the
central figure of the miser, represented with the same mobility of
temperament noticeable in George Eliot's creations--a thing
exceptional in Balzac's work. Grandet, as long as his wife lives is
reclaimable--just reclaimable. Subsequently, he is an automaton
responsive only to the sight and touch of his gold.
The dedication of _Eugenie Grandet_ is to Maria; and Maria, portrayed
under the features and character of the heroine, was, we learn, an
agreeable girl, of middle-class origins, who, in the year of 1833,
attached herself to Balzac and bore him a child.
This liaison was running its ephemeral course just at the time when
accident made him acquainted with his future wife. On the 28th of
February 1832, his publisher Gosselin handed him a letter with a
foreign postmark. His correspondent, a lady, who had read, she said,
and admired his _Scenes of Private Life_, reproached him with losing,
in the _Shagreen Skin_, the delicacy of sentiment contained in these
earlier novels, and begged him to forsake his ironic, sceptical manner
and revert to the higher manifestations of his talent.
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