The Girl with the Golden Eyes: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Girl with the Golden Eyes, credited to Honoré de Balzac, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Girl with the Golden Eyes, by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) Translated by Ellen Marriage (1865-?). Read by Martin Geeson. "Give me a feast such as men give when they love," she said, "and whilst I sleep, slay me..." Listeners who like to plunge straight into a story would do well to skip the lengthy preamble. Here, Balzac the virtuoso satirist depicts the levels of Parisian society as a version of the Inferno of Dante - but perhaps keeps the reader waiting too long for the first act of his operatic extravaganza. Our beautiful, androgynous hero, Henri de Marsay, is one of the bastard offspring of a depraved Regency milord and himself practises the cynical arts of the libertine. His quarry is the exotic Paquita Valdes, she of the golden eyes. But there is a mysterious third person in this liaison... The shocking truth of their interrelationships marks this out at once as one of those French novels that Lady Bracknell would instantly ban from the house. (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Girl with the Golden Eyes
• Author credits: Honoré de Balzac
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 11
• Listed recording duration: 4:30:40

Catalogue topics

• satire
• Comédie Humaine
• Paris
• seduction
• relationships

Track guide

1. 01 - Preamble: Paris — 1:00:32
2. 02 - 'Upon one of those fine spring mornings...' — 29:46
3. 03 - 'The young man who called himself...' — 17:50
4. 04 - 'De Marsay was not impulsive...' — 22:06
5. 05 - 'When, after making an excellent meal...' — 19:40
6. 06 - 'At the hour mentioned Henri was...' — 30:23
7. 07 - 'For the next and succeeding day Henri disappeared...' — 21:40
8. 08 - 'If it be impossible to paint the unheard-of delights...' — 17:25
9. 09 - 'At breakfast, by the time he had started...' — 19:17
10. 10 - 'Paquita seemed to have been created for love...' — 16:19
11. 11 - 'De Marsay was driven to the house...' — 15:46

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.