Colonel Chabert / Atheist's Mass

by Honoré de Balzac

Scenes From Private Life from The Human Comedy (La Comedie Humaine). By the French author, who, along with Flaubert, is generally regarded as a founding-father of realism in European fiction. His large output of works, collectively entitled The Human Comedy (La Comedie Humaine), consists of 95 finished works (stories, novels and essays) and 48 unfinished works. His stories are an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in contemporary bourgeois France. They are placed in a variety of settings, with characters reappearing in multiple stories.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Classics

92 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1836

About the author

French writer Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac), a founder of the realist school of fiction, portrayed the panorama of society in a body of works, known collectively as La comédie humaine .

Honoré de Balzac authored 19th-century novels and plays. After the fall of Napoléon in 1815, his magnum opus, a sequence of almost a hundred novels and plays, entitled, presents life in the years.

Due to keen observation of fine detail and unfiltered representation, European literature regards Balzac. He features renowned multifaceted, even complex, morally ambiguous, full lesser characters. Character well imbues inanimate objects; the city of Paris, a backdrop, takes on many qualities. He influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles John Huffam Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Jack Kerouac as well as important philosophers, such as Friedrich Engels. Many works of Balzac, made into films, continue to inspire.

An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac adapted with trouble to the teaching style of his grammar. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. Balzac finished, and people then apprenticed him as a legal clerk, but after wearying of banal routine, he turned his back on law. He attempted a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician before and during his career. He failed in these efforts From his own experience, he reflects life difficulties and includes scenes.

Possibly due to his intense schedule and from health problems, Balzac suffered throughout his life. Financial and personal drama often strained his relationship with his family, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, he married Ewelina Hańska, his longtime paramour; five months later, he passed away.

Reviews

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read only "Colonel Chabert" and in the Project Guttenberg online edition which I could transfer to my Kindle.

Colonel Chabert is a novella. It is Balzac's unending virtue to show us how badly we behave even when faced with moral demands or at least the demands of compassion. Here, the eponymous Colonel returns years after he was believed to have been killed in battle. Does he meet with a good welcome? Of course not. Even when he is believed, he is treated with deceit and essentially like dirt. Balzac describes so well what the mad scramble of the Restoration in France must have been like as numbers of people are trying to grab back or redeem their pre-revolution status and riches. It is a vicious wrestling match with no holds barred.

[Catherine Woodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am pretty new to Balzac, but two things. He really nails the human condition in each and every tales he tells, and while this is very good, it is not his best. Read some of his novel length works and then, when you have nothing left and still need more, turn to the stories. This falls in between, as more of a novella, but I would have loved to see it fleshed out to a full length book.
The colonel is a legendary and long presumed to have fallen hero of Napoleon's rampaging Austrian campaign. He was declared dead after the Eylau, which was a bloody, deadly, and indecisive battle between Napoleon's Grande Armée and the Imperial Russian Army under the command of Levin August von Bennigsen near the town of Preussisch Eylau in East Prussia. He literally clawed his way out of a grave and is now a shattered, diminished, and yet still recognizable figure who returns to Paris to discover the breadth and depth of his wife's betrayal.

[Mitzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

What if you were pronounced dead but didn't really die? Balzac reveals once again the depths of human greed and the lengths that one will go for love. Money is the measure of these emotions in Balzac's world, but he also reveals how the Law (or the Word) can define a person's life. If you are legally dead, it doesn't matter much if you are breathing, you aren't able to claim anything--your wife, your money, your experiences, even your name. It's a short read, but Balzac captures so much with so little.

[Bennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and good account of one of Napoleon's soldiers. Seriously injured in battle and given up for dead, this tales how the colonel 'comes back to life' and tries to recover everything that he lost from his wife to his money and possessions. It took a while to get into it but then it became a very interesting story.

[Marianne Villanueva · Rating 3 out of 5]

Began great. Got a little maudlin at the end.

[Mike Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

The “non-person” Colonel Chabert’s declaration: “Am I dead, or am I alive?” (Project Gutenberg version) makes me think Balzac anticipated Schrödinger’s cat paradox by 100 years! Lol