Albert Savarus

Albert Savarus (1834-35)
Pessimistically autobiographical in which Balzac looks towards his death. Savarus fails in his carreer, then in love, and finally becomes a monk. (Robb 338-339)

A lawyer, Albert Savarus, descends quietly upon a small town, closed in it's small town ways to the intrusions of outsiders. Nobody notices him until a legal case is inadvertently placed in his hands and he wins it and another and another. He attracts the attention of merchants in the town who give him their cases and that of a young woman who procedes to fall in love with him and thoroughly investigate his mysterious life.

Balzac uses some interesting narrative techniques and changes of perspective in this story. The young female character (one of Balzac's representative readers?) re-enacts the very act of reading a Balzac novel, a sort of eavesdropping on the lives of others, and gathers intelligence about the lawyer. The background on his love life is provided indirectly by the autobiographical story he writes as filler for the provincial newspaper he founds.

To continue on where the novel leaves off, the young woman blackmails her maid who is romantically involved with Albert Savarus's servant and has the maid bring all of the letters that Savarus sends. She uses this power over his mail at first to effect his defeat in the upcoming election so he will remain for another five years and marry her and then to effect a break with the woman he loves so she can marry him. Ultimately she fails, he retires to a monastery, and she gets hit by a train, disfigured, and lives out the remainder of her days without a husband. Balzac can sometimes be a bit of a male chauvinist.

(Medium, Albert Savarus, svrus10.txt)