ABSTRACT
This passage presents a web of suggestive connections. The couple's delight in the Cathedral, one of the architectural masterpieces of mediaeval Christianity, is followed by a reading of familiar Cantos from the great epic poem of that same culture; and then, as a decline or a coming down to earth, they turn to a secular representation of the nineteenth-century provincial France they are visiting. It is as if Balzac's novel is the appropriate reading for their comfortable lodging in the Amiens hotel, just as Dante's poem is the appropriate reading for their experience of the Cathedral. Indeed, the woman who waits on them presents one of those 'scenes of provincial life' that Balzac is wont to describe, a life which, in its quiet regularity and absence of pleasure, bears a passing resemblance to that of the Grandets' servant Nanon and, in some respects, to the fate of Eugenie Grandet herself.
