The Thirty-Year-Old Woman

"The Thirty-Year-Old Woman" occupies an honorable place in Balzac's legacy, complementing the vibrant palette of "Scenes from Private Life".

An elegant and tender narrative about love in its highest manifestations also became a requiem for married life.

The heroine of the novel, Julie, an extraordinary, independent, and free-spirited woman in her expressions of feelings, bids farewell to youthful illusions and becomes disillusioned with marriage. After all, "we are often destroyed not by grief itself, but by lost hopes." And when you melt away from your husband's indifference and coldness, doesn't it sometimes "seem that legal love is more burdensome than criminal passion"? "...And since in France, and indeed in the whole white world, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of women feel misunderstood and disappointed, they find in Balzac a physician who was the first to name their ailment.

He excuses any misstep they make, as long as that step is taken out of love; he dares to say that not only the "thirty-year-old woman" but also the "forty-year-old woman", and even she, who has known and understood everything, has the highest right to love." Stefan Zweig