The Celibates

In The Celibates, Balzac forms a unit of three unrelated stories concerning bachelors and old maids. In the first, "Pierette," a young woman is sent to live with her aunt and uncle, an unmarried brother and sister who view her as a leech on their business earnings and hound her beyond endurance. In the second, "The Vicar of Tours," a socially unaware priest who has inherited the furniture, books, and rooms in a lodging house of a fellow priest, is put to grief by his landlord, an elderly unmarried woman who takes her new lodger's social awkwardness for insults and decides to retaliate. In the third, "A Bachelor's Establishment," a widow has two adult sons, a painter and a soldier. The painter is poor but loves her dearly; the soldier is arrogant, completely indifferent to her, and has a gambling addiction that leads him to steal from everyone around him, including his family. Nevertheless, it's the soldier who is her favorite, and it's him to whom she turns when she finds her inheritance at risk from a ruffian and his girlfriend. Perfect for readers who appreciate masterful French literature and incisive social commentary, this collection showcases Balzac's unparalleled ability to dissect human nature and society's constraints. With his characteristic psychological depth and satirical wit, Balzac delivers three unforgettable tales that expose the tragic consequences of isolation and social conventions in 19th-century France. 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.)