One of the summits of the cycle, Eugénie Grandet is the drama of a life sacrificed to avarice. At Saumur, the cooper Félix Grandet, become through shrewd speculation one of the richest men in the town, lives in sordid parsimony, tyrannizing his effaced wife and his daughter Eugénie, whom he keeps ignorant of the immense fortune he accumulates. The monotonous existence of the Grandet house is upset by the arrival of the Parisian cousin, Charles Grandet, an elegant dandy whose father has just been ruined and has killed himself. Eugénie, discovering love, falls for this unhappy cousin and, in a surge of generosity, secretly gives him her own gold coins — her girlish treasure — to help him set out to seek his fortune in the Indies. When Grandet learns that his daughter has stripped herself of her gold, his fury is terrible and poisons the life of the house; the mother dies of grief. Charles, gone to the colonies, enriches himself through the most dubious trade, gradually forgets his cousin, and out of ambition plans to marry a girl of the nobility. Eugénie, faithful for years, inherits at her father's death a colossal fortune — but a fortune that brings her no happiness: betrayed by Charles, she finally contracts a loveless marriage of convenience, then, widowed, lives alone, devout and charitable, a prisoner of the gold that has sterilized her existence. Balzac deploys a masterly analysis of avarice as a total passion and of its ravages upon a feminine destiny. The contrast between material wealth and emotional poverty, the picture of a province steeped in money, and the pure, resigned figure of Eugénie make this concentrated novel a masterpiece of tragic density.