The Lily of the Valley
Honoré de Balzac, 1836
A young man remembers the married woman who taught him desire and restraint in a French valley—and the cost of loving someone who refuses to be possessed.
Honoré de Balzac
1799–1850
Balzac drew on his long affair with Laure de Berny, twenty-two years his senior, for the novel's older married heroine; he called her 'Dilecta'.
Feels like longing, love and tenderness.
The night a star in your sky turns into a person.
A new soul, a soul with iridescent wings, had burst its chrysalis within me. My favorite star, dropping from the blue waste where I had admired it, had become woman, while preserving its light, its sparkle, and its brilliancy. Suddenly, knowing nothing of love, I had fallen in love. Is not this first irruption of the most intense feeling a man can know a very strange thing? I had met some pretty women in my aunt’s drawing-room; they had not made the slightest impression on me. Is there an hour, a conjunction of the stars, a combination of fitting circumstances, a particular woman above all other women, which seal a passion as exclusive at the age when passion includes the whole female sex? Books by Honoré de Balzac
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