Petty Troubles of Married Life

Balzac turns marriage into a comic battleground where vanity, jealousy, and disappointment expose the gap between romantic illusion and domestic truth. In a sly preface and a series of letters and conversations, wives compare the petty humiliations that become real suffering: a husband's tobacco, coldness, jealousy, or public familiarity can wound more deeply than grand betrayals. Caroline and Stephanie recall how polished suitors become tedious or domineering spouses, while Claire, writing from the country, imagines Parisian marriage as glamorous only to learn how modest, precarious, and socially constrained it really is. The novel widens from domestic satire to the world of ambition through Adolphe de Chodoreille, a provincial dreamer who comes to Paris convinced that literary fame will be easy and profitable. His long apprenticeship in cafés, salons, and newspapers reveals that success depends on labor, patience, learning, and endurance, not talent alone. Caroline's letters trace the same hard lesson from inside marriage: she supports Adolphe with her inheritance, sees through Parisian pretensions, and recognizes his ordinariness without losing affection. Witty, bitter, and deeply ironic, the book dissects marriage, reputation, and social ambition with sharp comic intelligence. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.