Money is indeed one of Balzac’s chief protagonists throughout The Human Comedy, and here we are at the heart of its acquisition and growth. It is telling that at the end of the tale, Gobseck has acquired more than he can disburse: Bankrupt creditors have filled his apartment with things, with goods, many of them spoiling and useless, a kind of accumulation of surplus capital that the system cannot handle. Though it is only alluded to in this story, the future of Gobseck’s cash legacy is instructive. He leaves it to his one descendant, his niece Esther. She has had an extraordinary existence, from bit player at the Opéra to fashionable prostitute, then redemption through her passionate love for the young poet and novelist Lucien de Rubempré—but then a forced return to prostitution willed by Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin, the former convict and mastermind of Lucien’s career who knows Lucien must raise one million francs in order to buy back his mother’s entailed properties, proving his right to carry the name of landed gentry and enabling his marriage to Clotilde de Grandlieu of the noble Faubourg. The plot goes awry. Esther is sold to the Baron de Nucingen, an Alsatian banker and the husband of Goriot’s other daughter, Delphine—but after one night spent honoring “the debt of dishonor,” as she calls it, Esther commits suicide. She leaves Nucingen’s payment in an envelope for Lucien under her pillow—but it’s stolen by the household servants, which will lead to Lucien’s arrest. When Derville tracks her down with the news of her immense legacy, it’s too late. Too late for everyone: Esther is dead, and Lucien has hanged himself in prison. The money is parceled out to Lucien’s provincial relatives. The trajectory of Gobseck’s fortune suggests Balzac’s thoroughly ironic view of the new moneyed classes coming to power in France.

“The Duchesse de Langeais,” the final tale of the volume, clearly cannot be classified as a short story or tale but rather as what Henry James called “the blessed nouvelle,” indicating by his word choice that he thought it a French form little used by English novelists. Its advantage for Balzac seems evident, and here it yields one of his most perfect works. “The Duchesse de Langeais” shows, once again, how short forms both stimulate and discipline Balzac’s extraordinary imaginative powers. Rather than bursting the seams of novelistic form—as some of his longer works do—the short stories and novellas seem packed to the stretching point but nonetheless intact, with a palpable form to them. Here Balzac’s mastery becomes evident in his concentration of force within form.

The story of the duchess and her admirer General Armand de Montriveau opens with a notable and enigmatic abruptness on a rocky island in the Mediterranean, site of a convent of the Barefoot Carmelites where the music of the choir of nuns reveals to the interested, passionate listener—the general who has lost her and has been seeking her everywhere—the hidden presence of a Frenchwoman. Then we flash back some years, to the games of love and seduction as they are played in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. As we read into the third chapter, though, these will take on a sinister kind of seriousness, leading to a scene that might figure in The Story of O and seems to result in an erotic conversion but one that the other party can’t understand. And then the fourth chapter, returning to the Mediterranean isle, plays out the dramatic denouement. The presentation of the story is highly cinematic: It is full of strikingly rendered settings and moments of intense confrontation and fraught dialogue—and it has been made into a film several times, most recently by Jacques Rivette (in a version that to me loses much of the dynamic of the story). The novella shows Balzac’s ability to manipulate different time strata with perfect ease, to reveal the deep nature of the central enigmas of love and passion parsimoniously, so that when we think we have understood it’s only in part, and perhaps most notably his ability to sustain a kind of erotic tension throughout: Games of love become almost unbearably intense. Desire rules over the organization of life, and of story. “The Duchesse de Langeais” is one of the most perfect of Balzac’s works—everything, even the very baroque excursus on organ music as a go-between bringing together the divine and the human, even the scene of incipient S/M, fits perfectly and ministers to the overall effect.

Balzac has repeatedly, from the beginning of his career, been accused of writing badly. It is true that he often reaches for a kind of sublime that seems tasteless and over the top. We may sometimes wonder at Henry James’s unstinting admiration for someone who had little of his own delicacy of touch. Yet once we have accepted the premises of Balzac’s kind of expressionism—his recourse to melodramatic plots, hyperbolic speech, and dramatic confrontations where all the moral stakes are laid on the table—we can see that when he is writing at highest intensity he is incomparable. The goal of his melodramatic imagination is to find the latent intensities of life, to make dramatic action tell us about the ethical stakes of our engagements with ambition, love, and one another. That this takes him beyond the bounds of the “realism” for which he became famous into something else, some more occult realm where the real is trumped by the nearly surreal, has bothered those who want to confine the novel to more behavioristic premises. Balzac refuses to be confined in any manner—for him, fiction has a permit to go anywhere and explore anything. His short fiction may give him the greatest freedom of all; it allows the exploratory probe onto ground that not only is forbidden to politer, more repressed forms of expression but also is only partly grasped.