The Memoirs of Two Young Wives

Two very intelligent, very idealistic young women leave the convent school where they became the fastest of friends to return to their families and embark on their new lives. For Renée de Maucombe, this means an arranged marriage with a country gentleman of Provence, a fine if slightly dull man for whom she feels admiration but nothing more. Meanwhile, Louise de Chaulieu makes for her family’s house in Paris, intent on enjoying her freedom to the fullest: glittering balls, the opera, and above all, she devoutly hopes, the torments and ecstasies of true love and passion. What will come of these two very different lives?

Despite Balzac’s title, these aren’t memoirs; rather, this is an epistolary novel. For some ten years, these two will—enthusiastically if not always faithfully—keep up their correspondence, obeying their vow to tell each other every tiny detail of their strange new lives, comparing their destinies, defending and sometimes bemoaning their choices, detailing the many changes, personal and social, that they undergo. As Balzac writes, “Renée is reason. . . Louise is wildness. . . and both will lose.” Balzac being Balzac, he seems to argue for the virtues of one of these lives over the other; but Balzac being Balzac, that argument remains profoundly ambiguous: “I would,” he once wrote, “rather be killed by Louise than live a long life with Renée.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), one of the greatest and most influential of novelists, wrote some eighty-five novels in the course of his last twenty years, including such masterpieces as Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette. NYRB Classics publishes The Unknown Masterpiece and The Human Comedy: Selected Stories.

Jordan Stump is a writer, translator, and professor of French at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Morris Dickstein is a prominent American literary scholar, writer, critic, historian, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at CUNY Graduate Center. He was born in New York City and received his education at Columbia, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Cambridge, and Yale. From 1973 to 2003 he was a contributing editor to Partisan Review, and is currently a member of the National Society of Film Critics. His writing has been published in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, Bookforum, and The Nation, among others. Dickstein has published several books, including Gates of Eden, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and most recently a memoir, Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education.