SOURCE: "Eugénie Grandet's Career as Heavenly Exile," in Essays in Literature, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Fall 1989, pp. 271-80.

In the following essay, Fischler examines Balzac's depiction of Eugénie as an exile from the heavenly realm.

Balzac liked to suggest to his readers that some of the exceptional men and women of La Comédie humaine were exiles, more suited for a realm where categories and gradation are irrelevant than for cramped quarters "ici-bas." The argument was a romantic commonplace. He was able to vitalize it, however, by adding consistently a very literal dimension to exile as metaphor, by suggesting, as he did in Eugénie Grandet, that removal from one's habitual environment or sphere of influence is a reality whose effects can be observed, or by arguing, as he did in some of the Etudes philosophiques, that the sense of separation from an extraterrestrial sphere is a...