At the Sign of the Cat and Racket by Honoré de Balzac

Description

The story opens in a narrow street of old Paris, where the sign of a cat playing at racket hangs above a prosperous draper’s shop. Inside lives Augustine Guillaume, the youngest daughter of the house, sheltered and dutiful, whose one secret passion is the young painter gazing down from his attic across the street. Balzac traces the courtship from first glance to altar, and then past the altar into the quieter tragedy that follows.

Written in 1830 as Balzac’s first signed work, the novella is the seed of the whole Comédie humaine: an anatomist’s eye turned on merchants, artists, nobles, and the marriages that knit their worlds together. Its famous salon scene, in which Augustine tries to become the artist’s equal and fails at her own cost, still ranks among the sharpest passages in nineteenth-century fiction.

Why readers still come back to it

• The story that launched the Comédie humaine, complete and self-contained.
• A study of how two people who truly love each other can still miss each other’s world.
• Balzac’s first proof of the ruthlessly precise observation he would never stop applying.

About this DodaBooks edition

This DodaBooks edition has been prepared for pleasure reading: a clear, unhurried typeface, a simple navigable table of contents, and structure that stays comfortable on phone, tablet, or e-reader screen. Your purchase unlocks a text set to be read, not merely scanned, the moment your order completes.