At thirty years of age Eugénie knew none of the joys of life. Her pale, sad childhood had glided on beside a mother whose heart, always misunderstood and wounded, had known only suffering. Leaving this life joyfully, the mother pitied the daughter because she still must live; and she left in her child's soul some fugitive remorse and many lasting regrets. Eugénie's first and only love was a wellspring of sadness within her. Meeting her lover for a few brief days, she had given him her heart between two kisses furtively exchanged; then he had left her, and a whole world lay between them. This love, cursed by her father, had cost the life of her mother and brought her only sorrow, mingled with a few frail hopes.
Honoré de Balzac
Eugénie Grandet
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
-from the exhibition catalogue
spent the afternoon with the ghosts of balzac and bourgeois.
bourgeois' interpretation of balzac's novel.
lost time and regret.
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