Lost Illusions: Ève and David

About this film

LibriVox recording of Lost Illusions: Ève and David by Honoré de Balzac. (Translated by Ellen Marriage.) Read in English by Bruce Pirie Ève and David (1843) is the final book in Balzac’s Lost Illusions trilogy, which is part of his sweeping set of novels collectively titled La Comédie Humaine . The story is set in post-Napoleonic France. In the first volume of the trilogy ( Two Poets , 1837), we meet Lucien Chardon, an aspiring poet frustrated by the pettiness of provincial life. In the second volume ( A Distinguished Provincial at Paris , 1839) Lucien, now using the more aristocratic-sounding surname "de Rubempré," leaves his family in order to seek fame and fortune in the literary world of Paris. By the end of that book, he faced imminent emotional and financial collapse. In this present volume, the reader is returned to the provincial town of Angoulême, where Lucien's sister Ève and her husband, Lucien's friend David, have been desperately struggling against clever competition to keep a their printing shop afloat. Their situation is complicated when Lucien's financial distress spills over into their lives. Balzac’s work was hugely influential in the development of realism in fic…

Directors & creators

Honoré de Balzac

Subjects

librivox; audiobooks;greed; realism; hypocrisy; ambition; provincial france; printing industry; 19th-century france

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