‘Le Lys dans la vallee’ has been pronounced by an able French critic to be the worst novel he knows; but as a study of more or less ethereal and slightly morbid love it is characterized by remarkable power.  Its heroine, Madame Mortsauf, tied to a nearly insane husband and pursued by a sentimental lover, undergoes tortures of conscience through an agonizing sense of half-failure in her duty.  Balzac himself used to cite her when he was charged with not being able to draw a pure woman; but he has created nobler types.  The other stories of the group are also decidedly more interesting.  The distress of the abbe Birotteau over his landlady’s treatment, and the intrigues of the abbe Troubert (’Le Cure de Tours’) absorb us as completely as the career of Caesar himself in Mommsen’s famous chapter.  The woes of the little orphan subjected to the tyranny of her selfish aunt and uncle (’Pierrette’), the struggles of the rapacious heirs for the Mirouet fortune (’Ursule Mirouet,’) a story which gives us one of Balzac’s purest women, treats interestingly of mesmerism (and may be read without fear by the young), the siege of Mlle. Cormon’s mature affections by her two adroit suitors (’Une Vielle fille’), the intrigues against the peace of the d’Esgrignons and the sublime devotion to their interests of the notary Chesnel (’Le Cabinet des antiques’), and finally the ignoble passions that fought themselves out around the senile Jean Jacques Rouget, under the direction of the diabolical ex-soldier Philippe Brideau (’La Rabouilleuse,’ sometimes entitled ’Un Menage de Garcon’), form the absorbing central themes of a group of novels—­or rather stories, for few of them attain considerable length—­unrivaled in the annals of realistic fiction.

The ‘Scenes of Country Life,’ comprising ‘Les Paysans,’ ’Le Medecin de campagne,’ and ‘Le Cure de village’ (The Village Priest), take high rank among their author’s works.  Where Balzac might have been crudely naturalistic, he has preferred to be either realistic as in the first named admirable novel, or idealistic as in the two latter.  Hence he has created characters like the country physician, Doctor Benassis, almost as great a boon to the world of readers as that philanthropist himself was to the little village of his adoption.  If Madame Graslin of ’Le Cure de village’ fails to reach the height of Benassis, her career has at least a sensational interest which his lacked; and the country curate, the good abbe Bonnet, surely makes up for her lack on the ideal side.  This story, by the way, is important for the light it throws on the workings of the Roman Church among the common people; and the description of Madame Graslin’s death is one of Balzac’s most effective pieces of writing.