La Grenadière is a tale of elegiac atmosphere, set in the luminous valley of the Loire near Tours, in a charming house that gives the story its title. A woman still young and beautiful, called Lady Brandon, comes to retire there with her two sons. Everything in her bearing betrays a painful past — perhaps a fault — and above all a declining health: she has come there to die far from the world, in the peace of this landscape. The narrative dwells on the deep tenderness uniting her to her two sons, the elder Louis-Gaston and the younger Marie-Gaston, and on the maternal anguish that torments her: what will become of these boys after her death, with neither secured name nor protection? The tale is almost without plot; its value lies in the atmosphere, in the loving description of the banks of the Loire, and in the contained emotion of a mother preparing her sons for orphanhood. Feeling her end near, Lady Brandon gives the elder counsels of courage and probity, charging him to watch over his brother. Her death leaves the two children alone before existence. Balzac unfolds a rare lyricism here, blending the beauty of the Touraine countryside with the melancholy of a broken feminine destiny whose history of passion and abandonment one divines without its being told. The figure of Marie-Gaston will reappear in La Comédie humaine (notably in Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées), inscribing this miniature in the web of recurring characters. La Grenadière is one of the tenderest, most poetic pages of the cycle — a literary tomb dedicated to maternal love and the beauty of the Loire.