Colonel Chabert

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

4.3

Word count: 135K words
Chapters: 14

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Colonel Chabert by Honoré de BalzacAuthor: Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850,Language: English, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jul 1, 2004

Editor's review

Colonel Chabert is a short but powerfully striking novella within Balzac's La Comédie Humaine. Through a soldier wrongly declared dead who returns years later yet cannot prove his identity, the novel exposes the cold logic of law, property, and marital relations during the Restoration. The work's value lies not in an outlandish plot but in Balzac's near-legal precision in showing how identity is redefined by social institutions and how human existence is swallowed by property relations. The narration is restrained, the details solid, and the courtroom and law-office scenes are especially masterly. For Chinese readers, this is at once a parable of injustice and a small window onto the structure of nineteenth-century French society. It suits being read in one sitting in a quiet stretch of time; a little follow-up reading on the historical background of the French Restoration afterward will deepen the appreciation.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who enjoy realist classics and want to know Balzac's novellas and short stories
Readers in the humanities and social sciences interested in law, identity, and property
Students who want to encounter nineteenth-century French fiction in a shorter form
Readers looking for a concentrated English classic that can be read in one sitting

Not a good fit for

Readers of popular fiction who prefer fast pacing and strong dramatic conflict
Beginners hoping to read a complete panoramic overview of the La Comédie Humaine system
Readers wholly unfamiliar with nineteenth-century French history who are unwilling to consult supplementary material

Reading tips

Read the whole piece through in an hour or two without stopping to check notes, preserving your overall sense of the narrative rhythm.
After finishing, revisit the passages involving legal procedure and property disputes, noting the tension between the characters' words and the logic of institutions.
Gain a little background on Restoration-era French society, then read a second time; the inevitability of the characters' predicaments will become clearer.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

What is the relationship between this book and La Comédie Humaine?

Colonel Chabert is a novella within Balzac's La Comédie Humaine system, often grouped among the 'scenes.' It stands independently and can be understood without reading other works, but seen within the overall framework of La Comédie Humaine, Balzac's systematic observation of French society comes through more fully.

How difficult is the English, and can a non-English major read it?

This is a nineteenth-century English translation; the sentences tend to be long, and the vocabulary of legal and social scenes is fairly formal, but the plot line is clear. Readers with college-level English reading ability can finish it with the help of notes; there is no need to look up every legal term—grasping the characters' situations is enough.

What are the features of this edition?

This edition comes from Project Gutenberg and is a public-domain e-book with an English text; the file is small and easy to open on a computer or e-reader. It contains no modern scholarly introduction or detailed notes, so readers who want background material should consult relevant historical and literary sources separately.

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About the author

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850 Author

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a French novelist best known for his vast series La Comédie humaine. The library holds 143 of his works, including Father Goriot, Lost Illusions, Eugénie Grandet, and several volumes of La Comédie humaine. His writing is distinguished by dense detail, a large cast of characters, and an intricate social network, often linking separate works through recurring figures to portray nineteenth-century French society. He excelled at depicting the power of desire, ambition, and money through precise settings and strong narrative tension, and he exerted a lasting influence on later realist fiction. Beyond the broad outline of his life, public information is limited, so this note focuses on the themes and style of his works.