ABSTRACT
Paris is the subject of profound cultural mythologies, supercharged with meaning and over determined by a long history of associations as a cosmopolitan city. Honore de Balzac's Girl with the Golden Eyes exposes a complex of issues surrounding the immigration of Spanish Americans into Paris that stands in for a larger idiom of immigration and the symbolic practices that it generates. Honore de Balzac's fetish-centred Girl with the Golden Eyes recalls a history of the fetish as a French phenomenon. The fetish is, Robert Nye suggests, unique to French culture for a number of reasons having to do with the French origins of the discourses of the fetish. Paris is considered the exemplary cosmopolis, "the crown of the world, a brain which perishes of genius and leads human civilization" Gomez Carrillo revises the economy of Balzac's narrative, displacing the cultural one-sidedness of colonial exchange with the notion of French doing business with the French.
