num_pages: 120
description: When the night came, he went to the meeting-place, and quietly let himself be blindfolded.Raw as Honoré de Balzac is famed to be, this daring novella—never before published as a stand-alone book—is perhaps the most outlandish thing he ever wrote. While still concerned with the depiction of the underside of Parisian life, as is most of Balzac’s oeuvre, The Girl with the Golden Eyes considers not the working lives of the poor, but the sex lives of the upper crust.In a nearly boroque rendering with erotically charged details as well as lush and extravagant language, The Girl with the Golden Eyes tells the story of a rich and ruthless young man in nineteenth century Paris caught up in an amorous entanglement with a mysterious beauty. His control slipping, incest, homosexuality, sexual slavery, and violence combine in what was then, and still remains, a shocking and taboo-breaking work.
language: English
title: The Girl With The Golden Eyes
titlecomplete: The Girl With The Golden Eyes
characters: Marquise de San-Réal, Henri de Marsay, Ferragus XXIII, Marquis de Roquenrolles, Paquita Valdez, Lord Dudley
genres: Literature, Classics, Queer, Novels, 19th Century, France, French Literature, Fiction, Novella, Romance
ratings_count: 1840
series: La Comédie Humaine, The Thirteen, Études de mœurs : Scènes de la vie parisienne
publisher: Melville House