Selected Short Stories »

The fifty stories that Balzac wrote during his working life display all the qualities of his novels, and many of them feature the charaters that throng theComedie Humaine. Nevertheless, while they do offer an interesting counterpoint to the great novels, the stories as themselves.

For this volume Sylvia Raphael has chosen twelve stories, includingAn Incident in the Reign of Terror, The Atheist's Massand The Red Inn. All of them reveal Balzac's ability to excite curiosity, his intituitive grasp of what made other lives tick and his instinctive understanding of the contradicions in human behavior.