# Monsieur de Sommervieux — Shorts from Scenes from Private Life character guide

> Monsieur de Sommervieux in Shorts from Scenes from Private Life by Honoré de Balzac.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Sommervieux, Thédore de Sommervieux

**First appearance:** 0002-at-the-sign-of-the-cat-and-racket

## Snapshot

A young painter who studies old Paris with an antiquary's fervor, and finds in a merchant's sheltered daughter the living masterpiece he must possess.

## Who they are

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.

## In the story

### [At the Sign of the Cat and Racket](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/shorts_from_scenes_from_private_life_se/chapters/at-the-sign-of-the-cat-and-racket)

The painter and husband of Augustine, whose genius and neglect cause her suffering.

### [Pierre Grassou](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/shorts_from_scenes_from_private_life_se/chapters/pierre-grassou)

A master in whose studio Grassou studied composition.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/shorts_from_scenes_from_private_life_se/characters/monsieur_de_sommervieux
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/shorts_from_scenes_from_private_life_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/shorts_from_scenes_from_private_life_se/characters