Béatrix

The du Guénics are one of the oldest families in Brittany, and Calyste is the twenty-one year old only son of the patriarch. A long-time family friend is determined to marry off one of her nieces to Calyste, but he's in love with a woman of forty. Although Camille is flattered by the attentions of a man half her age, she recognizes the futility of his feelings. She decides that she'll introduce him to her friend Béatrix, a twenty-eight year old woman of the world, with far-reaching implications for everyone involved. Balzac's vivid characterizations provide the compelling backdrop to the story of Calyste's introduction to love. Béatrix, as originally written and published, contained only the first two parts of the present novel; Balzac didn't add the third until several years later. Perfect for readers who love sweeping French literature and complex romantic entanglements set against the backdrop of aristocratic society. Balzac's masterful portrayal of passion, social convention, and the destructive power of unrequited love creates an unforgettable tale of three lives forever changed by desire and manipulation. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)