Vendetta

Vendetta is a is a historical fiction work written originally in French by Honoré de Balzac, a French novelist and playwright known for his masterpiece of " La Comédie humaine", a novel series which portrayed post-Napoleonic French life.

Excerpts:

The man stood there with folded arms and a bowed head, which he sometimes raised to look alternately at the consular palace and at his wife, who was sitting near him on a stone. Though the woman seemed wholly occupied with the little girl of nine or ten years of age, whose long black hair she amused herself by handling, she lost not a single glance of those her companion cast on her. Some sentiment other than love united these two beings, and inspired with mutual anxiety their movements and their thoughts. Misery is, perhaps, the most powerful of all ties.