Character guide

Ginevra di Piombo

major

Also known as Mademoiselle Piombo, Mademoiselle Ginevra, Ginevra, Piombo

Ginevra is the daughter of Bartolomeo di Piombo, a Corsican who once sheltered the young Bonaparte and now lives in proud poverty in Paris. Raised on tales of vendetta and family honor, she has inherited her father's unbending will and his smoldering sense of injury. When love enters her life, it forces her to choose between the two absolutes she has been taught to revere: her father's authority and her own heart. Her struggle anchors the story's central drama of loyalty, exile, and the cost of passion.

Emilie de Fontaine

major

Also known as Mademoiselle Emilie de Fontaine, Fontaine, Emilie, Mademoiselle de Fontaine

Emilie de Fontaine moves through the glittering drawing-rooms of the Faubourg Saint-Germain with the assurance of a young woman who knows her own worth and finds the marriage market wanting. Her pride is both armor and flaw: she dismisses eligible men with a wit that amuses society but isolates her from genuine attachment. When a stranger's indifference piques her vanity, her carefully guarded heart becomes the battlefield on which her prejudices must fall. Her education in humility drives the story's emotional arc.

Gaston de Nueil

major

Also known as M. le Baron Gaston de Nueil, Gaston, M. de Nueil, de Nueil

Gaston de Nueil arrives in the provinces a restless, romantic young man, eager for the passion that Paris society has so far denied him. He becomes fixated on Mme. Willemsens, a reclusive widow whose melancholy beauty and evident suffering stir both his curiosity and his tenderness. His pursuit of her secret becomes the engine of his own undoing, as he must reckon with a love that demands more than he anticipated. His story explores the collision of youthful idealism with the buried sins of an older generation.

Augustine Guillaume

major

Also known as Mademoiselle Augustine Guillaume, Augustine, Mademoiselle Guillaume, poor Augustine

Augustine Guillaume grows up behind the counter of her father's prosperous Paris shop, her world bounded by domestic duty and filial obedience. When a suitor of higher social standing is chosen for her, she submits with the passivity of a daughter trained never to question paternal judgment. Her marriage becomes a quiet tragedy of mismatched souls, as her simple devotion meets a husband whose ambitions and tastes lie elsewhere. Her story exposes the human cost of treating marriage as a commercial transaction.

Hippolyte Schinner

major

Also known as Schinner, Hippolyte

Hippolyte Schinner has risen from poverty to acclaim through talent and his mother's selfless devotion, earning the Cross of the Legion of Honor at just twenty-five. Fastidious in his friendships and still possessed of a boyish idealism, he is unprepared for the treachery that lurks beneath the polished surface of the society he has entered. When he falls in love, he must test whether his faith in human goodness can survive the revelation of those closest to him. His story pits artistic integrity and filial love against the corrosive power of betrayal.

Derville

major

Also known as M. Derville, Monsieur Derville, dear M. Derville

Derville moves through the drawing-rooms and back offices of Restoration Paris with the quiet authority of a man who knows where the money and the skeletons are buried. Trusted by the great families who retain him, he observes their passions, follies, and crimes with a professional detachment that never quite hardens into indifference. His role as legal adviser places him at the intersection of fortune and feeling, where he must weigh the claims of justice against the frailties of those he serves. His presence lends the collection its connective tissue of worldly wisdom and moral witness.

Pierre Grassou

major

Also known as Fougères, Grassou, Pierre Grassou of Fougères, Pierre, poor Fougères

Grassou grinds out small canvases in a spotless fourth-floor studio on the Rue de Navarin, surviving on rolls soaked in milk and the grudging commissions of Elias Magus, a picture dealer who buys his work for two or three hundred francs and treats him as a useful fool. He has won the Cross but not the respect of the artist tribe, and he knows it; his Dutch neatness and resigned patience betray a man who has made peace with mediocrity without ever ceasing to want more. When Magus arrives with a suspiciously good job, the painter's wary Latin tag — Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes — signals the quiet, calculating intelligence that will shape his strange ascent.

Honorine

major

Also known as the absent Honorine, the Comtesse Honorine, Comtesse Honorine

At the Comtesse de Gondreville's party, Honorine becomes the silent victim of a quiet coalition of society ladies who bury her in darkness rather than let a dangerous beauty compete for attention. Montcornet and the lawyer Martial study her across the room, debating whether she is wife or widow, struck by flesh-tints like a white rosebud and an expression like an elegy. Her passivity and isolation make her the evening's most tantalizing puzzle — a woman whose tears and withdrawal will draw the curious into the mystery of her hidden life.

Colonel Chabert

major

Also known as Chabert, poor Chabert, the Colonel, the said Chabert, Hyacinthe Comte Chabert

Chabert moves through Restoration drawing rooms as a ghost of the Empire, a man whose military glory belongs to a France that has already moved on. In the passages here he appears among the gossips at a ball, trading dry remarks about weeping women with the lawyer Martial, his soldier's bluntness cutting through society's polished surfaces. His struggle to be recognized — legally, socially, personally — makes him the emotional center of a story about how thoroughly history can erase a man who outlives his moment.

Popinot

major

Also known as M. Popinot, M. d’Espard, Judge Popinot, Jean-Jules Popinot

Jean-Jules Popinot belongs to that rare breed of magistrate who treats the law as an instrument of compassion rather than mere procedure. Moving through the glittering world of diplomats, artists, and salon hostesses — the world of Camille Maupin and the Genoese villa — he reads character the way others read briefs, patient and unillusioned. His presence in the collection anchors Balzac's recurring faith that somewhere in the machinery of society there remains a man willing to look closely at what everyone else prefers not to see.

Madame de Beauséant

supporting

Also known as Mme. de Beauséant, de Beauséant, the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, la Vicomtesse

Madame de Beauséant moves through Balzac's provincial and Parisian scenes as the living standard of a vanishing nobility — haughty, exquisite, and quietly aware that the world is passing to men who read the Débats instead of the Quotidienne. Her presence sharpens the contrast between the fossil grandeurs of the old houses and the self-satisfied wealth of the new, and between true refinement and the anxious imitation of it. When she withdraws, as she does, the withdrawal registers as a judgment on the society that has made her position untenable.

Adam Laginski

major

Also known as Count Adam Mitgislas Laginski, Count Adam, Adam Mitgislas Laginski, Laginski

Count Adam Laginski arrives in Paris as a refugee from the Polish rebellion, but his mother's prudent mortgage of the family estates has left him with eighty thousand francs a year and an ancient name that even the Faubourg Saint-Germain must respect. His marriage to Clémentine du Rouvre, once mocked as a mad passion, becomes the season's triumph, and by 1836 he is the fashion itself. Yet the very ease of his position — adored, wealthy, transplanted — sets up the tensions of a man whose happiness depends on a world he can never quite call his own.

Clémentine Laginski

supporting

Also known as Clémentine, Clémentine Laginski, Laginski

Clémentine Laginski enters Paris as the beautiful young wife of Count Adam, whose fortune and ancient Polish name silence the drawing-rooms that once mocked her rash marriage. By 1836 she is one of the reigning queens of the Faubourg, moving among the flower of Parisian society. Her virtue is unimpeachable and her position dazzling, yet the very perfection of her happiness becomes the fragile surface on which the drama of loyalty and friendship will be tested.

Madame Firmiani

supporting

Also known as Firmiani, Madame, the real Firmiani

Madame Firmiani receives the best company in Paris while going nowhere herself, and her salon is a stage on which observers, contradicteurs, and old men of the world rehearse their theories about her. She is credited with too many adorers to have a lover, and her husband is a creature of fancy whom no one has ever seen. Her charm and reserve make her the object of collective speculation, and the question of who she really is becomes the quiet engine of the story.

Martial de la Roche-Hugon

supporting

Also known as Baron Martial de la Roche-Hugon, the Baron Martial de la Roche-Hugon, the Baron de la Roche-Hugon

Baron Martial de la Roche-Hugon moves through the world of Restoration and July Monarchy society as a man of rank whose private life is anything but orderly. His entanglements and his taste for intrigue place him at the center of situations where reputation, money, and desire collide. He matters because the scandals that gather around him expose how thin the line is between respectable society and its hidden compromises.

Horace Bianchon

supporting

Also known as Bianchon, Horace, Doctor Bianchon, Doctor Horace Bianchon

Horace Bianchon is the famous doctor whom Balzac's Paris trusts with its bodies and its secrets, a friend of Rastignac and a fixture of the great houses. He reads women's ages in their temples and noses, and he reads men's ambitions with the same clinical detachment, warning Rastignac against trading one illusion for another. His friendship and his candor make him the moral sounding board against which the follies of the fashionable world are measured.

Paz

supporting

Also known as Count Paz, the Paz, Captain Paz, Poor Paz, Thaddeus Paz

Count Paz, called Poor Paz, is the exiled soldier whose loyalty to Adam Laginski binds him to the household as friend, steward, and silent guardian. Beneath his self-effacement lies a secret passion for Clémentine that he will neither confess nor betray. His quiet sacrifice is the moral center of the story, and the tension between his devotion and his desire drives the early and middle arc toward its reckoning.

Thaddeus of Warsaw

supporting

Also known as Warsaw, Thaddeus, poor Thaddeus, Thaddeus of Warsaw

Thaddeus of Warsaw belongs to the melancholy company of Polish émigrés whose lost homeland and ruined fortunes shadow their lives in France. His tragic history and his guarded manner set him apart in the salons, where his silence invites speculation and sympathy alike. He matters because his presence embodies the cost of exile and the secret griefs that Parisian society prefers to overlook.

Gobseck

major

Also known as Daddy Gobseck, Grandaddy Gobseck, M. Gobseck, Papa Gobseck

Gobseck is the shadowy moneylender to whom aristocrats, merchants, and heirs surrender their secrets along with their interest payments, and his ledger is a map of Parisian ruin. He lends without warmth yet with perfect precision, hoarding gold while studying the passions that make men careless. His chilling detachment forces the story's young observers to confront what money truly buys in a society that pretends to despise it.

Caroline Crochard

supporting

Also known as Caroline, Caroline Crochard, Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille

Caroline Crochard enters the world of the story as a kept woman, her position sustained by a wealthy protector and her own fragile charm. Her circumstances expose the narrow options available to a woman without fortune, and the emotional cost of security purchased at the price of independence. Her choices ripple outward, testing the loyalties and moral assumptions of the men who orbit her.

Bartolomeo di Piombo

supporting

Also known as Bartolomeo, Piombo, the Piombo, a Piombo, little Bartolomeo

Bartolomeo di Piombo arrives in Paris with his wife and daughter, carrying the fierce loyalties of his island and a bond of life and death sworn to the First Consul. Proud, impoverished, and unbending, he measures the world by Corsican honor rather than Parisian fashion. His inflexibility shapes his daughter's fate and sets the family on a collision course with the city's colder calculations.

Eugène de Rastignac

supporting

Also known as Rastignac, Eugène, Monsieur Eugène

Rastignac moves through the salons and boarding-houses of Paris with the hunger of a man who has tasted poverty and glimpsed the heights. He is observant, charming, and increasingly willing to bend his principles to climb. His presence links the story's private dramas to the larger machinery of ambition, making him both witness and participant in the moral bargains of the age.

Comtesse de Merret

supporting

Also known as the late Comtesse de Merret, the late Madame de Merret, Madame de Merret, Madame la Comtesse de Merret

Madame de Merret lives in near-seclusion after her husband's death, refusing visitors and burning the furnishings of la Grande Bretêche before retreating to Merret. Her eccentric widowhood puzzles the neighborhood and feeds its gossip, yet her composure suggests a discipline forged by something she will not name. The silence she maintains becomes the story's central mystery, drawing the curious toward a past she has deliberately sealed.

Comte de Fontaine

supporting

Also known as The Comte de Fontaine, Monsieur de Fontaine, Fontaine, Monsieur le Comte de Fontaine

Monsieur de Fontaine has parlayed his easy conversation and political tact into sinecures for himself and his three sons, but his daughters remain unprovided for. He approaches the King with the delicacy of a man who knows that favors, like interest, must be drawn sparingly. His maneuvering exposes how Restoration society converts intimacy with power into dowries, marriages, and the quiet architecture of family fortune.

Guillaume

supporting

Also known as Madame Guillaume, old Guillaume, father Guillaume, Monsieur Guillaume

Guillaume belongs to the old provincial bourgeoisie Balzac sketches so sharply—people who measure respectability in rentes and arrange alliances with the precision of a ledger. His instinct for profit governs every family decision, including whom his daughters may love, and his stubborn thrift becomes a quiet tyranny within his household. He matters because his calculations set the domestic machinery in motion, forcing the younger generation to scheme against the very prudence that built the family fortune.

Louis-Gaston

minor

Also known as Louis-Gaston, Louis

The son of Gaston de Nueil and his abandoned wife.

Desplein

supporting

Also known as M. Desplein, The great Desplein, the great Desplein

Desplein moves through Parisian society as a man of science who has seen beneath the silk and gauze of fashionable women and found coldness, vanity, and vice. His scalpel-sharp judgments on Madame d'Espard and her kind reveal a physician who reads souls as readily as bodies, yet he keeps one secret of his own buried deep. That concealed generosity makes him the moral counterweight to the drawing-room monsters he dissects, and his confidences to Bianchon frame the story's meditation on virtue and hypocrisy.

Colonel Luigi

supporting

Also known as Luigi, dear Luigi, the Porta, little Luigi, Luigi Porta

Luigi Porta carries the Mediterranean world with him—its vendettas, its passionate attachments, its long memory for injury. Set against the glittering ease of Genoese villa society, where Camille Maupin and Parisian wits trade epigrams, his brooding intensity marks him as a man from another moral climate. His determination to avenge his family gives the story its tragic engine, and the collision between his Corsican code and the polished indifference of the world around him is what makes the early chapters hum with dread.

Monsieur Roger

minor

Also known as the gentleman Monsieur Roger, Roger

A gentleman involved in a tragic love affair.

Madame d'Espard

supporting

Also known as the late lamented Madame Popinot, Madame d’Espard, Popinot, Madame Popinot

Madame d'Espard presides over one of those brilliant Parisian drawing-rooms where wit sparkles and reputations quietly die. Dr. Bianchon sees through her: the delicate chestnut-haired woman pitying herself is, he insists, a creature of wolfish appetite and tigerish cowardice, capable of sacrificing genuine feeling to social power. Her scheming against her husband and her mastery of appearances make her the story's study in how fashionable women weaponize frailty, and her presence turns a medical conversation into an anatomy of the world's corruption.

Madame Willemsens

supporting

Also known as Mme. Willemsens, Willemsens, Mme, Marie Willemsens

Madame Willemsens is the mystery at the center of her village—watched by neighbors hungry for any interest to break their narrow days, she keeps her distance with a girlish coiffure and a face marked by sorrow. Her slender figure, her hollow eyes, and her deceptive composure suggest a woman who has retreated from the world rather than been defeated by it. Her devotion to her son and her refusal to explain herself make her the emotional enigma that draws the curious reader forward, promising a revelation worth the wait.

Napoleon

minor

Also known as the Emperor Napoleon

The Emperor of France, referenced as a historical figure.

Adélaïde

minor

A young woman caught in a family dispute over inheritance.

Marquise de Listomère

minor

Also known as Madame de Listomère, Madame, Madame la Marquise de Listomère, Marquise

A noblewoman who hosts a salon and observes society.

Joseph Lebas

minor

Also known as Joseph, Lebas, the luckless Joseph, young Lebas

A clerk who marries above his station.

Ernest de Restaud

minor

Also known as Ernest, de Restaud, Ernest de Restaud

The son of a countess, involved in family financial ruin.

Madame de Granville

minor

Also known as Granville, poor Granville

A neglected wife who seeks solace outside marriage.

Octave de Camps

minor

Also known as Octave, Monsieur Octave de Camps, Monsieur de Camps

A young man who marries a woman with a hidden past.

Comte de Merret

minor

Also known as Monsieur le Comte de Merret, Monsieur de Merret, Monsieur le Comte

A vengeful husband who discovers his wife's infidelity.

Maximilien Longueville

minor

Also known as Longueville, a Longueville, Maximilien, this Maximilien

A young man in love with a woman of higher rank.

Comtesse Ferraud

supporting

Also known as Madame la Comtesse, Madame Ferraud, the Comtesse Ferraud, Ferraud

Madame Ferraud moves through the glittering circles Balzac catalogues—drawing-rooms where observers, contradictors, and men of quality trade judgments on women like her. She has remarried well and now defends her position with the cool calculation of someone whose comfort rests on a buried past. Her composure under scrutiny and her willingness to protect her interests at any cost make her the story's study in social self-preservation, and the tension between her present respectability and her former life drives the drama toward its reckoning.

Count Férédia

minor

Also known as The Count, the Count, Count

A count involved in a duel over a woman's honor.

Julia

minor

Also known as Juliette

A young woman in a story about a lost message.

Camille Maupin

minor

Also known as Camille

A famous writer and salonnière.

Monsieur de Sommervieux

supporting

Also known as Sommervieux, Thédore de Sommervieux

Thédore de Sommervieux is an artist of genuine gifts whose eye for beauty extends past canvases to the people around him — a habit that proves dangerous when he fixes it on Augustine Guillaume, the innocent daughter of a draper. His Romantic temperament collides with the bourgeois world of the Cat and Racket, where art is a trade and marriage a transaction. That collision drives the story's central study of how an artist's passion, once domesticated, may curdle into something colder.

Madame de Sommervieux

minor

Also known as Sommervieux

The wife of the painter Sommervieux.

Marquis d'Espard

minor

Also known as M. le Marquis, M. le Marquis d’Espard, M. d’Espard, The Marquis, the Marquis

A nobleman seeking a commission in lunacy against his wife.

Comte de Granville

minor

Also known as Granville

A magistrate who appears in several stories.

Malaga

minor

Also known as Poor Malaga

A dancer and courtesan in the Parisian demimonde.

Bourgeat

minor

Also known as good Bourgeat

A humble water-carrier who inspires a famous surgeon.

Madame de Vaudremont

minor

Also known as de Vaudremont

A society woman involved in a scandalous affair.

Rosalie

minor

Also known as Rose Chapotel, Madame Rose Chapotel

A servant who becomes a key witness in a legal case.

Monsieur de Marsay

minor

Also known as de Marsay, the illustrious de Marsay

A dandy and politician who appears in several stories.

Virginie

minor

Also known as Mademoiselle Virginie, Virginie Vervelle

The daughter of a wealthy bourgeois family.

Elias Magus

minor

Also known as Ulysses, Magus, Elias, old Elias

An old Jewish art dealer and usurer.

Godeschal

minor

Also known as Monsieur Godeschal

A law clerk who assists Derville.

Madame Crochard

minor

Also known as Crochard

The mother of Caroline Crochard.

Montcornet

minor

Also known as Colonel Montcornet, General Montcornet

A Napoleonic general who becomes a landowner.

Madame Gobain

minor

Also known as Gobain

Gobseck's housekeeper.

Angélique Bontems

minor

Also known as Mademoiselle Angélique Bontems, Angélique, old Bontems, Mademoiselle Bontems

A young woman who marries a man she does not love.

Vicomte de Granville

minor

Also known as Granville, young Granville

A young nobleman who marries unhappily.

Servin

minor

Also known as Madame Servin, Monsieur Servin

A painter and his wife who host a young artist.

Laure

minor

Also known as Mademoiselle Laure, little Laure

A young girl who helps her mother in a draper's shop.

Maurice

minor

Also known as Monsieur Maurice

A servant in the household of the Comtesse Honorine.

Comte Ferraud

minor

Also known as M. Ferraud, Ferraud, M. le Comte Ferraud, the Comte Ferraud

The second husband of Colonel Chabert's wife.

Comte de Soulanges

minor

Also known as Soulanges, The Comte de Soulanges

A count involved in a domestic scandal.

Comtesse de Soulanges

minor

Also known as Soulanges, The Comtesse de Soulanges, Madame de Soulanges

The wife of the Comte de Soulanges.

Boucard

minor

Also known as Daddy Boucard

A clerk in Derville's law office.

Marguerite Turquet

minor

A courtesan known as Malaga.

Simonnin

minor

Also known as rascal Simonnin

A young clerk in Gobseck's office.

Fanny Malvaut

minor

Also known as France, Fanny

A virtuous young woman who marries a painter.

Vicomtesse de Grandlieu

minor

Also known as de Grandlieu, The Vicomtesse de Grandlieu

A noblewoman who advises her daughter on marriage.

Amélie Thirion

minor

Also known as Mademoiselle Amélie Thirion, Amélie, Amélie Thirion, Mademoiselle Thirion

A maid who testifies in a legal case.

Roguin

minor

Also known as Madame Roguin, Monsieur Roguin

A notary and his wife involved in financial scandal.

Mathilde Roguin

minor

Also known as Mademoiselle Mathilde Roguin, Mathilde

The daughter of a notary.

Mademoiselle des Touches

minor

Also known as mademoiselle, Mademoiselle

A wealthy woman who hosts literary salons.

Madame Vervelle

minor

Also known as Vervelle, Little father Vervelle, M. Vervelle, father Vervelle

A bourgeois couple who commission a portrait.

Madame de Lansac

minor

Also known as de Lansac

An elderly noblewoman who advises a young countess.

Madame de Sérizy

minor

Also known as de Sérizy, Madame

A society woman who helps Colonel Chabert.