Farewell

Description

Published in 1830, Farewell is a short, but very intensive novella by the founder of European realism, Honoré de Balzac. The complex short story is about the horrors of wars and the mutilating effect of warfare on human lives – subject matter that combines with Balzac extraordinary storytelling style to make a powerful text, providing the reader with a profound and shaking experience.

Farewell is part of Balzac’s most important work, La Comédie Humaine, a huge collection of short stories set in France in the period after Napoleon’s fall. Just like the other stories in the collection, Farewell can be read as a completely independent writing or as an essential and organic part of the big picture that Balzac proposes to offer to his readers with his magnum opus.

The story of Farewell starts with two men, Marquis d’Albon and Philippe de Sucy going out hunting in the woods, losing their way during the trip. They come across an old convent and a beautiful, but wild, strange, slightly maddened woman. Little by little, the past of the woman is revealed and the men find out about the hardships the woman had endured during the Napoleonic wars, more precisely during the massacres she witnessed as Napoleon’s army had been retreating from Moscow. They also find out that the woman is in fact Phillipe’s long lost love, discovery that puzzles everyone in the story and brings about numerous dilemmas, attempts to rescue the woman from the claws of her own psyche and also sadness and tragedies.

Farewell gives the reader the best of Balzac’s prose. The novella is perhaps not as well-known as others included into the collection, but it definitely deserves the attention of readers who are already familiar with Balzac’s writing, as well as of those who are newcomers to Balzac’s universe.
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