Diotimos Library · Literary Fiction Collection · Bilingual Edition
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
La Fille aux yeux d’or · French with an independent close English translation
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Facing Pages · Branch 19 of 66
Novella · ¶ 14
French
p. 40Le pauvre Henri de Marsay ne rencontra de père que dans celui des deux qui n’était pas obligé de l’être. La Paternité de monsieur de Marsay fut naturellement très-incomplète. Les enfants n’ont, dans l’ordre naturel, de père que pendant peu de moments; et le gentilhomme imita la nature. Le bonhomme n’eût pas vendu son nom s’il n’avait point eu de vices. Alors il mangea sans remords dans les tripots, et but ailleurs le peu de semestres que payait aux rentiers le trésor national. Puis il livra l’enfant à une vieille sœur, une demoiselle de Marsay, qui en eut grand soin, et lui donna, sur la maigre pension allouée par son frère, un précepteur, un abbé sans sou, ni maille, qui toisa l’avenir du jeune homme et résolut de se payer, sur les cent mille livres de rente, des soins donnés à son pupille, qu’il prit en affection. Ce précepteur se trouvait par hasard, être un vrai prêtre, un de ces ecclésiastiques taillés pour devenir cardinaux en France ou Borgia sous la tiare. Il apprit en trois ans à l’enfant ce qu’on lui eût appris en dix ans au collége. Puis ce grand homme, nommé l’abbé de Maronis, acheva l’éducation de son élève en lui faisant étudier la civilisation sous toutes ses faces: il le nourrit de son expérience, le traîna fort peu dans les églises, alors fermées; le promena quelquefois dans les coulisses, plus souvent chez les courtisanes; il lui démonta les sentiments humains pièce à pièce; lui enseigna la politique au cœur des salons où elle se rôtissait alors; il lui numérota les machines du gouvernement, et tenta, par amitié pour une belle nature délaissée, mais riche en espérance, de remplacer virilement la mère: l’Église n’est-elle pas la mère des orphelins? L’élève répondit à tant de soins. Ce digne homme mourut évêque en 1812, avec la satisfaction d’avoir laissé sous le ciel un enfant dont le cœur et l’esprit étaient à seize ans si bien façonnés, qu’il pouvait jouer sous jambe un homme de quarante. Qui se serait attendu à rencontrer un cœur de bronze, une cervelle alcoolisée sous les dehors les plus séduisants que les vieux peintres, ces artistes naïfs, aient donné au serpent dans le paradis terrestre? Ce n’est rien encore.
The Girl with the Golden Eyes: Novella
p. 41Poor Henri de Marsay found a father only in the one of the two who was not obliged to be one. Monsieur de Marsay's Paternity was naturally very incomplete. In the natural order, children have a father for only a few moments; and the gentleman imitated nature. The good man would not have sold his name if he had had no vices. So he ate without remorse in the gambling houses, and drank elsewhere, the few half-yearly payments that the national treasury paid to annuitants. Then he delivered the child to an elderly sister of his, Mademoiselle de Marsay, who took great care of him, and from the meager pension allotted by her brother gave him a tutor, an abbé without sou or farthing, who took the measure of the young man's future and resolved to pay himself, out of the hundred thousand livres of income, for the care given to his pupil, whom he came to love. This tutor happened by chance to be a true priest, one of those churchmen cut out to become cardinals in France or Borgia beneath the tiara. In three years he taught the child what he would have been taught in ten years at college. Then this great man, named the Abbé de Maronis, completed his pupil's education by making him study civilization under all its aspects: he nourished him on his experience, dragged him very little into the churches, then closed; took him sometimes into the wings, more often to the courtesans; he dismantled human feelings for him piece by piece; taught him politics at the heart of the drawing rooms where it was then roasting; numbered for him the machines of government, and attempted, through friendship for a fine nature abandoned but rich in promise, manfully to replace the mother: is not the Church the mother of orphans? The pupil responded to so much care. This worthy man died a bishop in 1812, with the satisfaction of having left beneath heaven a child whose heart and mind were so well fashioned at sixteen that he could run rings around a man of forty. Who would have expected to encounter a heart of bronze, a brain steeped in alcohol beneath the most seductive exterior that the old painters, those naïve artists, gave to the serpent in the earthly paradise?
Socrates
Reading The Girl with the Golden Eyes · Novella · ¶ 14
Ask about a concept, passage, contradiction, or connection.
Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Honoré de Balzac’s The Girl with the Golden Eyes turns Paris into a charged study of wealth, appetite, spectacle, secrecy, possession, and power. This exact page-aligned Literary Fiction edition presents the novella’s continuous movement in French with an independent close English translation prepared by Diotimos Editions.
Historical Text and Translation
The French reading text follows the 1843 Furne edition as presented in the Furne corrigé transcription at eBalzac and is checked, where needed, against the Gallica image of the volume. The original hierarchy, dedication to Eugène Delacroix, continuous sectioning, and closing 1834–1835 dateline are retained.
About Diotimos Editions
Diotimos Editions prepared this independent close translation directly from the French. Meaning, agency, logic, degree, reference, image, repetition, and ambiguity take precedence over elegance; Balzac’s clause order and long accumulations remain wherever grammatical English can bear them.
Rights
Balzac’s French source work is in the public domain. The 2026 English translation and Diotimos editorial matter are original to this edition and remain © 2026 Diotimos.