At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

Monsieur Guillaume is a draper in Paris. He owns his shop, La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote and took the business over from his master, also marrying the daughter.

• Guillaume is the very portrait of the successful bourgeois.

He has three clerks apprenticed to him, the first of whom, Joseph, is an orphan he intends to marry to his elder daughter Virginie. However, Joseph is in love with the younger daughter Augustine but Augustine is in love with a successful artist Théodore.

• How will all this turn out?
• At the Sign of the Cat and Racket is a short novel by Honoré de Balzac.
• It was first published in 1830, but the story takes place about two decades earlier.

It is one of the earliest pieces Balzac wrote for inclusion in his Comédie Humaine, the collection of 91 interconnected writings in which he documents the entire scope of French society in the early 19th century.