La Maison du chat-qui-pelote

La Maison du chat-qui-pelote ends with an evocation of a marble cippus in the cimetière Montmartre, Its inscription informs the reader, as well as the passer-by, that 'madame de Sommervieux' died at the age of twenty-seven:

Dans les simples lignes de cette épitaphe un ami de cette timide créature voit la dernière scène d'un drame. Chaque année, au jour solennel du 2 novembre, il ne passe jamais devant ce jeune marbre sans se demander s'il ne faut pas des femmes plus fortes que ne l'était Augustine pour les puissantes étreintes du génie. ¹

Augustine's early death is the logical denouement of the drama of her marriage to a famous artist, and her epitaph might well have included the resonant line from Poe's The Oval Portrait: 'And evil was the hour she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter.' ² But this is no Gothic melodrama, and the Pygmalion elements of Augustine's story — brought alive by a painted likeness, she will return to a death in marble — are mapped onto the realist canvas that Balzac would retrospectively choose as the entry point to La Comédie humaine. Whereas, in Sarrasitie, the story of a painting turns out to contain that of a statue — a statue that will survive the sculptor's violent attempt to destroy it, along with its model Zambinella — in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, the 'jeune marbre' conceals the parallel life stories (from conception to destruction) of a painting and a marriage.