Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honoré de Balzac’s „Eugénie Grandet” (1833) is one of the earliest and most famous novels in his „Comedie humaine” cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violent...