Audiobook · read by volunteers
Letters of Two Brides
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850)
Read by Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Michelle Crandall, Peter Yearsley, Denny Sayers (d. 2015), Sean McKinley, David Barnes · 57 chapters · 9 h 09
About the book
Louise de Chaulieu and Renée de Maucombe grow up as close friends in a convent school. When they leave, their lives part: one is swept into the glittering salons of Paris, the other settles into a quiet country existence. What remains is the letters. Over many years the two women write to each other about marriage, ambition, motherhood, money, desire and disappointment, each confiding what she would tell no one else.
Balzac’s epistolary novel lets you eavesdrop on these confidences, and the contrast between the two voices is its great pleasure. One writes with dash and daring; the other with steadiness and a sharp eye for small domestic truths. Their choices, so different, are tested by time. In 57 short letters and a little over nine hours, this is an intimate portrait of friendship and of the narrow paths nineteenth-century society left open to women, told with wit, tenderness and sometimes a sting.
Introduction
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) is best known for La Comédie humaine, the vast cycle of novels and stories in which he set out to portray the whole of French society in the decades after Napoleon. Letters of Two Brides belongs to that cycle. It is told entirely in letters, a form that was already well established in European fiction and that suited his interest in how people present themselves to others, and to themselves.
The novel follows two friends, Louise de Chaulieu, later Madame Gaston, and Renée de Maucombe, later Madame l’Estorade. They meet at a convent and begin a correspondence that lasts some seventeen years. Because we read only what they choose to write, we see them through their own self-portraits, and sometimes catch what they leave out. Balzac gives them very different temperaments and very different worlds, so that the exchange becomes a kind of quiet debate about how a woman might live, and what she might have to give up.
The English translation recorded here is by R. S. Scott, who died in 1899, and the version was published in 1902. The recording comes in 57 sections and runs for about nine hours, read by LibriVox volunteers. Letters make a natural fit for a shared reading, since each voice can take on a writer for a while.
If you enjoy nineteenth-century fiction but would like something more intimate than the great panoramic novels, this is a good place to begin. It is a book about friendship, about the distance that grows between people who once knew each other completely, and about the small drama of waiting for a reply.
Public domain
Honoré de Balzac died in 1850: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text