Excerpt from Eugenie Grandet, And, Ursule Mirouet: And Other Stories N such is, of course, quite excellent. She is not stupid, as her kind are supposed to be; she is only blindly faithful, as well as thoroughly good-hearted. Nor is the unfortunate Madame Grandet an idiot, nor are any of the comparses mere dummies. But naturally they all, even Eugenie herself to some extent, serve mainly as sets-off to the terrible Grandet. In him Balzac, a Frenchman of Frenchmen, has boldly de )icted perhaps the worst and the commonest vice of the French character, the vice which is more common, and certam worse than either the frivolity or the license with which the nation is usually charged - the pushing, to wit, of thrift to the loathsome excess of an inhuman avarice. But he has jus tified himself to his country by communicating to his hero an unquestioned grandeur. The mirage works again, but it works with splendid effect. One need not be a sentimentalist to shudder a little at the ta ta ta to of Grandet, the refrain of a money-grabbing which almost escapes greediness by its diabolical extravagance and success. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.