The House of Nucingen (Nucingen & Co., Bankers) (1826,37)

The House of Nucingen This short story "spins out the bewildering details of a grand coup of ruthless financial manipulation in the early heyday of private, unrestricted banking houses." (Fuller, 8)

The details of several shady business transactions are related over after-dinner conversation at a fashionable Parisian restaurant, Very's. The life of the party is the cartoonist Bixiou with his bitter irony and humor. There are four other journalists present at the meeting. Finot is a publisher of small newspapers, a tool for blackmail and buying political influence. Blondet is one of Finot's journalists. Couture is a "speculator" involved in a variety of shady business dealings. Balzac provides us with his own summary description of the conversations:

"I can think of nothing like it save a pamphlet against mankind at large which Diderot was afraid to publish, a book that bares man's breast simply to expose the plague-sores upon it. We listened to just such a pamphlet as Rameau's Nephew, spoken aloud in all good faith, in the course of after-dinner talk in which nothing, not even the point which the speaker wished to carry, was sacred from epigram; nothing taken for granted, nothing built up except on ruins, nothing reverenced save the sceptic's adopted article of belief--the omnipotence, omniscience, and universal applicability of money. (ncngn10.txt)

The rise to power and wealth of Rastignac, the most famous and successful of all Balzac's recurring characters, together with his benefactor the banker Nucingen, is sketched in great detail. After providing the banker with the invaluable service of babysitting his wife as her lover for several years, Rastignac gets the chance to prove himself as Nucingen's pawn in series of financial deals stretching over the years 1826 to 1829. The stories of the victims of these financial deals is also given in great detail. It is these details that can make this story a little boring for a reader who isn't thoroughly immersed in the Comedie Humaine.

(Short, La Maison Nucingen, ncngn10.txt)