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The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Honoré de Balzac (1799 - 1850)
Translated by Ellen Marriage (1865 - 1946)

Listeners who like to plunge straight into a story would do well to skip the lengthy preamble. Here, Balzac the virtuoso satirist depicts the levels of Parisian society as a version of the Inferno of Dante - but perhaps keeps the reader waiting too long for the first act of his operatic extravaganza.

Our beautiful, androgynous hero, Henri de Marsay, is one of the bastard offspring of a depraved Regency milord and himself practices the cynical arts of the libertine. His quarry is the exotic Paquita Valdes, she of the golden eyes.

But there is a mysterious third person in this liaison...

The shocking truth of their interrelationships marks this out at once as one of those French novels that Lady Bracknell would instantly ban from the house.

Read by Martin Geeson

Run Time 4 Hours 39 Minutes in 4 Audio CDs

Section --- Chapter --- Run Time

1 01 - Preamble: Paris - 01:00:32
2 02 - 'Upon one of those fine spring mornings...' - 29:46
3 03 - 'The young man who called himself...' - 17:50
4 04 - 'De Marsay was not impulsive...' - 22:06
5 05 - 'When, after making an excellent meal...' - 19:40
6 06 - 'At the hour mentioned Henri was...' - 30:23
7 07 - 'For the next and succeeding day Henri disappeared...' - 21:40
8 08 - 'If it be impossible to paint the unheard-of delights...' - 17:25
9 09 - 'At breakfast, by the time he had started...' - 19:17
10 10 - 'Paquita seemed to have been created for love...' - 16:19
11 11 - 'De Marsay was driven to the house...' - 15:46

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