# A Marriage Settlement — Character guide

> Key figures in A Marriage Settlement by Honoré de Balzac.

- [Paul de Manerville](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters/paul_de_manerville.md): Paul is the eligible heir of Lanstrac, a man whose elegance is real but second-rate: his servants are well drilled, his suppers succeed, and he has never once been the fashion. Having burned through his father's savings 
- [Madame Evangelista](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters/madame_evangelista.md): Madame Evangelista presides over the Evangelista household as its true strategist, weighing Paul de Manerville's title and acres against her Natalie's dowry with the precision of a notary. Her past — whispered of as prod
- [Mathias](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters/mathias.md): Mathias served Paul's avaricious father, managed Lanstrac while the heir toured Naples, Madrid, and London, and preserved the revenues his master was busy spending. He is the novel's voice of patient provincial sense — t
- [Mademoiselle Natalie Evangelista](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters/mademoiselle_natalie_evangelista.md): Natalie Evangelista has been raised by her mother to be the perfect match: lovely, well-bred, and equipped with a fortune that makes her the object of Bordeaux's most ambitious calculations. Around her the notaries circl
- [Maître Solonet](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters/maitre_solonet.md): Solonet is the Evangelista family's man of business, a sharp-tongued provincial attorney who treats the marriage settlement as a battlefield and each article as a position to be defended. Where old Mathias counsels patie
- [Henri de Marsay](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters/henri_de_marsay.md): De Marsay is the brilliant, cold-eyed man of the world whose long speech against marriage opens the book's central argument. He knows Paul's weaknesses exactly — the good horseman who cannot hold the reins of a household
- [Madame de Manerville](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters/madame_de_manerville.md): Paul's mother, concerned about her son's marriage.
- [Josette](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters/josette.md): A maid in the Evangelista household.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/a_marriage_settlement_se/characters