An enjoyable novella in which a mysterious sad-looking man helps a young needle woman and her mother when they are threatened with eviction. The inevitable follows. But this is not a simple story of love between a married man and his mistress. It is also an account of narrow-minded religious zeal, with passages which reminded me of some of the condemnations of loveless religion by Dickens and other 19th century English novelists; and there is a twist at the end which takes the reader by surprise and casts a new light on the whole tale. This is one of Balzac's better shorter works.