BOOK NOTICES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2250, 15 April 1897, Page 53

BOOK NOTICES.

EUGENIE GRANDET. j By H. de Balzac. Macmillan's Colonial Library. Danedin : James Horsburgh. The edition of Balzac's works now being issued by Macmillan for Indian and colonial circnlation is translated by Ellen Marriage and edited by George Saintßbury, who, to the principal books, gives prefaces which are somewhat remarkable for their candour. Of " Eugenic Grandet," for instance, it is said that the principal character, which gives the book its name, ie, like all Balzac's virtuous heroine?, more theatrical than real. This fault, however, is not peculiar to the virtuous heroine. The principal villain is also theatrical, and acts as no ordinary person — atleast no person conceived by a British writer — could act. Eugenic is the daughter of a miser in Saumur. The miser is, like other misers, hard and grasping, and his wife, like other misers' wives, meek and subservient. The daughter is also subservient, but has the temerity to fall in love with her cousin, tbe son of her father's Parisian brother. This cousin arrived from Paris on a visit, little knowing that his father was ruined and meditated suicide during his son's absence. Graudet tells his nephew of bis father's fate, and ships the young man oft' to India in order to get rid of him. The youth makes his fortune by slave dealing, and forgets Eugenic, who, however, remains faithful for many years, and finally completes her Belf - sacrifice by making him a marriage present of a receipt for all his dead father's debts. The inevitable impression left on thß reader is that the heroine is too good and the villain too bad. De Ba'zac has, in fact, laid on his colours with a much too lavish hand. Yet the book is not without merit. A work by such a writer could not be entirely so. But he began it and left it unfinished for a year, and it participated in the applause gained by the author for better work.