The novel revolves around the contrasting characters of two brothers. Philippe Bridau, the elder, Napoleon's aide-de-camp at the Battle of Montereau, had a brief but glorious career in the army before the fall of the Emperor. A handsome and dashing figure, although now with no prospects, he is still more popular than his younger brothers, Joseph, a man of less adventurous spirit whom his mother considers a shiftless, good-for-nothing artist.
As in other novels in the Comédie Humaine, to be without money is to be without power, almost without life itself; and in The Black Sheep it is a struggle to recover the family inheritance that entangles the two young men. In a hostile society in which you must kill to avoid being killed, deceive to avoid being deceived, the true nature of each other gradually emerges.
Donald Adamson's translation captures the radical modernity of Balzac's style, while his introduction places The Black Sheepin its context as one of the great novels of Balzac's renowned Comédie Humaine.
Translated with an Introduction by Donal Adamson
Editorial Review(s)
"No story in the world is more exciting than The Black Sheep, combining as it does the compelling readability of the blood-and-thunder with the deeper insights of literary art." --Donald Adamson in the Introduction.
About the Author
The son of a civil servant, Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.
