Le Colonel Chabert (New ed)

Balzac once referred to art as "nature concentrated".

Colonel Chabert -- one of the celebrated "Scenes from Private Life" from Balzac's lifelong project, La Comedie Humaine -- recounts the story of one of his most tragic heroes: a decorated Napoleonic War veteran believed to have been killed in battle.

Severely disfigured, the Colonel returns to Paris as if risen from the grave, to find his wife remarried, his Pension gone, and his name linked nostalgically to the faded days of Empire. "In reading Balzac, we can still feel and almost gratify those cravings which great literature ought to allay in us"