A miser in a provincial town has a fortune nobody suspects and a daughter whose whole inheritance he intends to keep from her; then a bankrupt cousin arrives from Paris with good manners. Balzac wrote it in 1833 and made cheeseparing into tragedy: every candle counted, every sou hoarded, and a life spent in one room. Forty-four plates by painters from Millet to Munch, gathered here in their forest, garden and woodland moods, give the novel's cramped provincial interiors their open-air counterpart.
