The themes of Honoré de Balzac’s surface-level narrative are obvious enough: an adulterous woman, a husband’s jealous rage, and his horrible act of revenge on his wife and her lover. Though Balzac’s story “La Grande Bretèche” is engaging on its own terms, one might uncover a deeper level of cultural meaning in it by interpreting it allegorically.

The catastrophic rupture of the union between Mr. and Mrs. de Merret, for example, can be interpreted as an allegory of the catastrophic rupture in the union between France’s people and the absolute monarchy of its Old Regime brought on by the French Revolution in 1789 and reinforced in 1830. The ruined condition of La Grande Bretèche visually symbolizes the cultural disintegration that resulted from France’s chaotic and often violent process of replacing a society grounded in Christian metaphysics with a society grounded in secular law.

The idea that the estate is associated with an ideal, prelapsarian existence before its catastrophic fall is found in Bianchon’s idealization of its “garden”—an obvious archetypal reference to the biblical garden of Eden—to which he is unusually attracted but from which he is excluded by Régnault and the power of law. Moreover, the narrator asks himself a series of questions about the estate’s ruined condition that suggest a more universal and allegorical catastrophic event: “What celestial fire swept through here? Did somebody insult God there? Did somebody betray France? That is what we are wondering.” These questions, of course, are never directly answered; they serve as an interpretive context through which the reader must filter the text’s symbolic evidence.

At the surface level, it is Mrs. de Merret who appears adulterous and thus unfaithful to her cultural heritage; at the allegorical level, however, one can see that her undying love for the Spaniard actually signals her unwillingness to renounce her devotion to the Old Regime ideals. It is significant that the Spaniard is described as a devout Christian and that he gives Mrs. de Merret the crucifix that is found in her hands at her death. It is also significant that Mrs. de Merret’s room was decorated in the Old Regime style, that on her nightstand lay a book entitled The Imitation of Jesus Christ, and that her dying words make direct reference to God. These symbolic details suggest that Mrs. de Merret could not shift her emotional allegiance from the old society to the new. Ironically, it is Mr. de Merret who is unfaithful from an allegorical point of view because he cannot tolerate his wife’s continued devotion to the ideals of the Old Regime and Christianity. To break his wife’s will to believe, he must physically separate her from the object of her faith and love by encrypting him behind bricks. He then mocks his wife’s contradictory behavior by reminding her that her agony is useless since, by her own testimony, the object she mourns never really existed.