Honoré de Balzac 33 min read

At his dying father's bedside, the profligate Don Juan is entrusted with a phial of the elixir that can restore life, and must choose whether to use it, or to seize his inheritance.

Honoré de Balzac's 1831 tale, part of the Comédie Humaine, is a dark fantasy-horror in the manner of Hoffmann. Sardonic, macabre, superbly told. Read it for a masterful Gothic parable of greed and deathlessness, where the great French novelist turns a tale of horror into a mordant study of human corruption.

In its time

Published in 1831, during the 1830s, poe and the german romantics.

Reading it

33 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).