Le Lys dans la vallée is one of Balzac's most celebrated novels, a summit of his depiction of ideal love and contained passion. The narrative takes the form of a long confession addressed by Félix de Vandenesse to a woman. Félix recounts the love of his youth for Madame de Mortsauf, whom he meets at a ball where, in an irrepressible impulse, he kissed the shoulders of this unknown woman. He finds her again in the luminous valley of the Indre, in Touraine, where she lives, married to a peevish, sickly man, the Comte de Mortsauf, and entirely devoted to her children and her duty. Between Félix and Henriette de Mortsauf is born a deep but chaste passion: she, faithful to her religious and conjugal principles, refuses to yield to love while sharing it intensely in a communion of souls; he, torn between respect and desire. Henriette is the "lily" of the valley, image of purity and sacrifice. But when Félix, gone to Paris, gives way to the advances of another woman, the sensual Lady Dudley, Henriette is mortally wounded by it. Consumed by a repressed love she never satisfied and by jealousy, she wastes away and dies, revealing at the end, in a heartrending letter, the extent of the passion she had stifled and the sufferings of her renunciation. Balzac sets spiritual, sublimated love against carnal love, and paints with sumptuous lyricism the landscapes of Touraine, mirror of feelings. A meditation on desire, duty, and sacrifice, the novel exalts the tragic grandeur of a virtuous woman destroyed by contained passion. Le Lys dans la vallée remains one of the great works of sentimental analysis. ---