Honoré de Balzac

Young playboy Charles Grandet is sent to live with his miserly uncle after his father loses his fortune. He and his cousin Eugenie fall in love, but his uncle sends him away and tries to arrange a marriage more to his liking (and profit!). Will true love triumph? (imdb)

Antoinette is the Duchess of Langeais, a married coquette who frequents the most extravagant balls in 1820's Paris during The Restoration, where hypocrisy and vanity reign.

Jessica Lange stars as Cousin Bette, a poor and lonely seamstress, who, after the death of her prominent and wealthy sister, tries to ingratiate herself into lives of her brother-in-law, Baron Hulot (Hugh Laurie), and her niece, Hortense Hulot (Kelly MacDonald)... (imdb)

A young French officer forms a strange bond with a leopard in the Egyptian desert.

Peterson based this romantic piece on Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre Inconnu and Picasso's Minotauromachie. The film combines a story of the competition for the love of a woman with images of a young girl with a candle wandering through a corridor, a modern adaptation of the mythological Minoan labyrinths. (hcl.harvard.edu)

A couple win a big house in a gamble, When they get there, don1t find it empty but full of ghosts of the last inhabitants

A hermit who lives along a rugged coast under a vow of silence reflects on the events that lead him to this fate.

A businessman and his partner are about to go bankrupt when the partner gets an idea to sail away and somehow find the money they need. Meanwhile, the one left behind has to figure out how to put off all the creditors, friends, family, investors, etc., until his partner comes back--IF his partner comes back. (imdb)

Les Chouans is set during the dark days of the French Revolution. The title translates as "The Royalists," and indeed the protagonists are a group of French refugees loyal to the toppled royal family. Operating in Brittany, the royalists make a courageous if futile stand against the Republican army and the pro-revolution police. Based on a novel by Honore de Balzac, the film's screenplay was surreptitiously updated to include a few pro-left sentiments. (Hal Erickson, Rovi)

Based on the story by Honoré de Balzac. Caught in a storm, two young doctors book into an inn for the night and find themselves sharing a room with a Dutch diamond merchant. During the night Prosper steals from the merchant, but when he awakes in the morning he finds the merchant dead and his friend gone. When the stolen property is found on him he is arrested for the crime and executed. 25 years later the innkeeper's daughter relates the tale to a traveler. (imdb)

Eugenia is a daughter of a wealthy but miserly man living a simple life in the provincial town of Saumur. Eugenia's inexperience leads her to fall in love with an unworthy man.

A thief tries to restore the fortunes of a nobleman.

Loosely based on Balzac's novel "La peau de chagrin", the story revolves around a man who steals a small, magical figurine named Narayana.

In 1860s France, a couple who have recently acquired a dilapidated country house in Vendôme discover within it the secret of a passionate love affaire that once took a macabre and sadly turn. it all began 50 years previously, when the wealthy landowner Gérard de Clergue fell madly in love with the beautiful young dancer Clara Biondi. In the course of the ensuing romance, Gérard remains blissfully ignorant of the fact that Clara had a previous lover, James de Poulay.

Felix Grandet reigns supreme in his modest house in Saumur where his wife and daughter Eugenie lead a distraction-free existence. Extremely avaricious, he does not take a favorable view of the beautiful parties who rush to ask for his daughter's hand. Nothing should damage the colossal fortune he hides from everyone. The sudden arrival of Grandet's nephew, an orphaned and ruined Parisian dandy, turns the young girl's life upside down. (imdb)

An adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's novel "Lost Illusions". (imdb)

The Duchess of Langeais, as beautiful as she is brilliant, is a woman who likes to seduce but who does not give in. Until the day when she falls in love with General de Montriveau, a cabal goes up against her.

One of the most vertiginous of Markopoulos’s interior landscape studies, Himself as Herself is based loosely on Balzac’s Séraphita. The film consists of a shimmering, nearly plotless evocation of gender identity in flux, and it contains some of Markopoulos’s most haunting, densely interlaced images. (filmaffinity.com)

Ralph Valentine and his father are musicians of proud and aristocratic ways and are so wrapped up in their art as to be oblivious of their poverty. Their faithful servant, Joseph, has been wont to withhold the threats of debtors from them, but there comes a time, shortly after the father's death, that Ralph must be told the truth.

An Empire colonel, left for dead on a battlefield, returns to Paris and finds his wife remarried.