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The Lily in the Valley

The Lily in the Valley

About the Book

A new translation of one of Balzac’s finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess—a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover.

A story of impossible and unsatisfied desire, Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley opens with a scene of desire unleashed. Félix de Vandenesse, the shy teenage scion of an aristocratic family, is at a ball, when his eyes are drawn to a beautiful woman in fashionable undress: before he knows what he is doing, he throws himself upon her, covering her bare back with kisses. In shock, she pushes him away. He leaves the party in shame.

The woman at the party is Henriette de Mortsauf, married to a much older count. Time passes, and Félix is reintroduced to her. Nothing is said of what transpired, though nothing is forgotten, and a courtship begins whose premise is that Félix will worship Henriette without displaying the least sign of desire. He waits on her. He plays endless board games with her impossible husband. He develops a language of flowers and presents her with elaborately coded bouquets. Félix and Henriette are in a swoon, until he departs for Paris to pursue a career in politics and takes up with the uninhibited Arabella Dudley. Meanwhile Henriette is on her deathbed. She writes him, “Do you remember your kisses? They have dominated my life and furrowed my soul. . . . They are my death!”

The Lily in the Valley is a terrible fairy tale of two people lost in a game of love—or is it? Peter Bush’s new translation brings out the psychological dynamics of one of Balzac’s masterpieces.
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Praise for The Lily in the Valley

“An imagination of the highest power, an unequalled intensity of vision. . . . What [Balzac] did above all was to read the universe, as hard and as loud as he could, into the France of his time.” —Henry James

The dramatic impasse of passion and its containment—it at times reads as the irresolvable conflict of eros and the death drive—animates The Lily in the Valley, sustains it as a challenging experience of reading. It is good to have it back, freshly translated. It has not grown old. —Peter Brooks, NYRB

“The Lily in the Valley, with its focus on love rather than money, is something of an outlier among [Balzac’s] books. It is also, at least in its depiction of its main character’s wretched childhood, Balzac’s most autobiographical novel…. Early 19th-century French society comes alive.” —Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal

"It is an outlier in Balzac’s work, and many of the generalisations we make about him won’t easily apply to it. It may be his most Romantic book: more lyrical, subtler and more autobiographical." — Raymond N. MacKenzie, London Review of Books

“It is a perplexing novel, and one that shows a side of Balzac not often seen…. Balzac took as his basis well-established tropes — the forbidden romance, the love triangle of differing temperaments, the unhappily married woman, the young man on the rise — and the epistolary novel form to create a pre-Freudian exploration of thwarted, repressed sexuality and deceit (of self and others).” —Eric Vanderwall, On the Seawall

“The Lily in the Valley is an engaging and affecting story… an incisive study of the constrained realities of women’s lives during the early 19th century, with the author showing his characteristic deep empathy for their plight, along with an ironic perception of masculine arrogance and complacency.” —Rob Latham, Los Angeles Review of Books

“The Lily in the Valley is an odd duck—an ambitious, wonderful, uneven novel, but one so good and so rich that you have to give him credit for not going right back to the grim hard-times world of Père Goriot." — Gideon Leek, The Harvard Review
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About the Author

Honoré De Balzac
More by Honoré De Balzac
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About the Author

Geoffrey O'Brien
Geoffrey O’Brien’s books include The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century, and Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties. He is editor in chief of the Library of America. More by Geoffrey O'Brien
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About the Author

Peter Bush
Geoffrey O’Brien’s books include The Browser’s Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading, The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the Twentieth Century, and Dream Time: Chapters from the Sixties. He is editor in chief of the Library of America. More by Peter Bush
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