Abstract

Published at the end of 1838, La Maison Nucingen is one of Balzac’s most enigmatic texts, and its full comprehension risks to escape the reader because of the extensive use of technical language belonging to the world of finance and the stock market. Through the analysis of the historical and legal context in which the novel was composed, the essay has the aim of helping to decipher some aspects of that text’s illegibility highlighted by critics, past and present, and comes to propose the hypothesis that La Maison Nucingen should be considered more than a financial story one of the most «profoundly juridical» novels of the entire Comédie humaine, in which the didactic function that law assumes in Balzac’s work is therefore expressed