Of Money and Obsession: Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans

Emile Zola, in explaining his conception of the "experimental novel" (he meant "experimental" not in the sense of unreadable avant garde prose, but the novel as quasi-scientific thought-experiment based on scientific knowledge of objective reality), referred to Balzac as the "father" of the form, specifically citing his book Cousin Bette as a model of such experimental rigor in its treatment of the theme of adultery.

Striking a work as Cousin Bette is in that regard, I found Balzac's The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, if perhaps a less satisfying work when taken as a whole, the book's first two parts are in their way a more forceful treatment of the interaction between money and "passion" of that kind as the Baron de Nucingen burns through francs by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of a woman he scarcely glimpsed one night in the woods.