Set in Besançon, Albert Savarus portrays a superior man whose ambition and love are shattered by the scheming of a jealous young woman. Albert Savaron de Savarus — a brilliant lawyer, journalist, and politician of great scope — has settled in the capital of Franche-Comté to win a deputy's seat and prepare his future. But he guards a secret: for years he has loved, with a faithful, distant devotion, a great Italian lady, the Duchesse d'Argaiolo, whom he hopes to marry once she is free. Albert has even transposed his story into a tale, "L'Ambitieux par amour," published in a review, which forms an embedded narrative revealing his passion. Rosalie de Watteville, a young woman of the local aristocracy and a rich heiress, falls in love with him on reading this text and guesses his secret. Consumed by jealousy, she sets out to destroy what she cannot possess: she intercepts and falsifies the correspondence between Albert and the duchess, making each believe the other has betrayed or abandoned them. The machination succeeds; the duchess, believing herself forsaken, marries another. Albert, annihilated by this incomprehensible rupture and by the collapse of his hopes, renounces the world and withdraws to a Carthusian monastery. Rosalie, finally punished by remorse and by the consequences of her crime, sees her own life ruined. Balzac paints the destructive power of feminine jealousy and the fragility of great destinies before subterranean passions. The novel, which blends a picture of provincial life, political ambition, and amorous tragedy, illustrates how a mediocre but relentless will can annihilate a man of the first rank. It is also a reflection on the gap between grand ambitions and the narrowness of the milieus that stifle them.