The Lily in the Valley - by Honoré de Balzac (Paperback)

About the Book

"A new translation of one of Balzac's finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess-a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover. A story of baffled and irrepressible desire, Balzac's The Lily in the Valley opens with a scene of desire unleashed. His protagonist, Felix de Vandenesse, the shy teenage scion of an aristocratic family, has been sent by his family to a ball in honor of a local dignitary. A wallflower at the party, his eyes are drawn to a beautiful woman in fashionable undress. She turns away from him, and, helpless, he stands, covering her bare back with kisses. In shock, she pushes him off. He leaves the party in shame. The woman at the party is Henriette de Montsauf, married to a much older count, the mother of two children whose health has been compromised by their father's past debauchery. Time passes, and Felix is reintroduced to her. Nothing is said of what transpired, though nothing is forgotten, and a courtship begins between the younger man and the still young mother, a courtship whose premise is that Felix will worship her without displaying the least sign of desire. He waits upon her. He plays endless board games with her impossible husband. He developes a language of flowers and presents her with elaborately coded bouquets. Felix and Henriette are in a swoon, until he departs for Paris to pursue a career in politics and takes up with the all too unconventional and uninhibited Arabella Dudley. Returning to the provinces, he learns Henriette is dying. She writes him, "Do you still today remember your kisses? They have dominated my life. They cut a furrow through my soul.... I am dying because of them." Balzac the great realist is an incomparable witness to the fantasies that are the stuff of ordinary life and of the countless excuses that so-called virtue makes for eagerly imagined vice. The Lily in the Valley is a terrible fairy tale of two people lost in a game of love-and hate. Peter Bush's new translation, the first in over a century, brings out psychological dynamics of one of Balzac's masterpieces"--

Book Synopsis

A new translation of one of Balzac's finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess--a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover.

A story of impossible and unsatisfied desire, Balzac's The Lily in the Valley opens with a scene of desire unleashed. Félix de Vandenesse, the shy teenage scion of an aristocratic family, is at a ball, when his eyes are drawn to a beautiful woman in fashionable undress: before he knows what he is doing, he throws himself upon her, covering her bare back with kisses. In shock, she pushes him away. He leaves the party in shame.

The woman at the party is Henriette de Mortsauf, married to a much older count. Time passes, and Félix is reintroduced to her. Nothing is said of what transpired, though nothing is forgotten, and a courtship begins whose premise is that Félix will worship Henriette without displaying the least sign of desire. He waits on her. He plays endless board games with her impossible husband. He develops a language of flowers and presents her with elaborately coded bouquets. Félix and Henriette are in a swoon, until he departs for Paris to pursue a career in politics and takes up with the uninhibited Arabella Dudley. Meanwhile Henriette is on her deathbed. She writes him, "Do you remember your kisses? They have dominated my life and furrowed my soul. . . . They are my death!"

The Lily in the Valley is a terrible fairy tale of two people lost in a game of love--or is it? Peter Bush's new translation brings out the psychological dynamics of one of Balzac's masterpieces.

Review Quotes

"An imagination of the highest power, an unequalled intensity of vision. . . . What [Balzac] did above all was to read the universe, as hard and as loud as he could, into the France of his time." --Henry James

"The Lily in the Valley, with its focus on love rather than money, is something of an outlier among [Balzac's] books. It is also, at least in its depiction of its main character's wretched childhood, Balzac's most autobiographical novel.... Early 19th-century French society comes alive." --Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal

"It is a perplexing novel, and one that shows a side of Balzac not often seen.... Balzac took as his basis well-established tropes -- the forbidden romance, the love triangle of differing temperaments, the unhappily married woman, the young man on the rise -- and the epistolary novel form to create a pre-Freudian exploration of thwarted, repressed sexuality and deceit (of self and others)." --Eric Vanderwall, On the Seawall

"The Lily in the Valley is an engaging and affecting story... an incisive study of the constrained realities of women's lives during the early 19th century, with the author showing his characteristic deep empathy for their plight, along with an ironic perception of masculine arrogance and complacency." --Rob Latham, Los Angeles Review of Books

"The Lily in the Valley is an odd duck--an ambitious, wonderful, uneven novel, but one so good and so rich that you have to give him credit for not going right back to the grim hard-times world of Père Goriot." -- Gideon Leek, The Harvard Review

About the Author

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, began his career as a pseudonymous writer of sensational potboilers before achieving success with a historical novel, The Chouans. Balzac then conceived his great work, La Comédie humaine, an ongoing series of novels in which he set out to offer a complete picture of contemporary society and manners. Always working under an extraordinary burden of debt, Balzac wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years. Also available from NYRB Classics are Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece, The Memoirs of Two Young Wives, and The Human Comedy: Selected Stories.

Peter Bush is an award-winning translator who has translated several books for NYRB Classics, including Josep Pla's The Gray Notebook, Ramón del Valle-Inclán's The Tyrant Banderas, and Joan Sales's Uncertain Glory. He lives in the UK.

Geoffrey O'Brien is an American poet, editor, book and film critic, translator, and cultural historian. He served as Editor-in-Chief of The Library of America for several years. His latest book, Arabian Nights of 1934, will be published in June 2023. He lives in Brooklyn.