The novella The Girl with the Golden Eyes is part of Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Its backdrop is Paris in the early 19th century, which emerges as a corrupt, decaying place whose motive forces are ‘gold and pleasure’. The scene-setting occupies almost thirty pages, during which time Balzac doesn’t even hint at the central characters. It’s a structural eccentricity from which the book never entirely recovers.

The plot, when it arrives, is lurid. Henri de Marsay, a Parisian hedonist, becomes infatuated with the golden-eyed Paquita Valdes. Her strict guardians keep her in a boudoir with a fifty-foot-wide bed and ‘red fabric hung with Indian muslin fluted like a Corinthian column’. Entering seems impossible (‘there isn’t a door in the city as mysterious’), but Henri contrives an ingenious method for sneaking in, involving a valet and a bribed postman. The couple meet several times in this way.

The novella reads more like a mythological tale than a work of Balzacian realism. Balzac presents Henri and Paquita as inordinately passionate, fantastically beautiful creatures. The superlatives with which they are described quickly grow tiresome: in one scene, when he discovers he might have a rival, Henri goes instantly