A doctor comes to a wretched village in the Grande Chartreuse and, over twelve years, makes it prosperous — roads, a school, a market, an industry — and tells the story of his life to a soldier who has come to hear it. Balzac worked at night on fifty cups of coffee a day and died at fifty-one; this is his political book, a village built on paper, and the Napoleonic legend recited by an old soldier in the middle of it is one of his great set pieces.