The Lily of the Valley

A boy starved of affection meets, at a ball, a woman who becomes the whole moral weather of his life, and the two hold to a love that is never allowed to be anything else. Balzac wrote it in 1835 against Sainte-Beuve's Volupté, meaning to show how such a story should be done, and put his own Madame de Berny into the figure of Madame de Mortsauf. The letter she leaves at the end reverses everything the reader has been told to admire. Fifty-five plates by painters from Chardin to Daubigny trace the quiet domestic interiors, farmyards and river landscapes of the world Balzac's lovers move through.