Above a draper's shop in old Paris hangs a signboard so ancient nobody can read it; inside, a merchant's daughter is admired by a fashionable painter who has never once considered what she is used to. Balzac opens the Human Comedy with this small book about a marriage between two classes - and shows, in a hundred pages, exactly how it kills her.

Above a draper's shop in old Paris hangs a signboard so ancient nobody can read it; inside, a merchant's daughter is admired by a fashionable painter who has never once considered what she is used to. Balzac opens the Human Comedy with this small book about a marriage between two classes - and shows, in a hundred pages, exactly how it kills her.