Ferragus begins like a Murnau or Fritz Lang film. In this 1833 novel, Balzac invites the reader to wander through Paris in pursuit of a mysterious woman, guided by his brilliant and extravagant prose. Italo Calvino considered the book "an atlas of the continent of Paris" and asserted that its author was "the first to intuit the city as language, as ideology, as a condition of all thought, word, or gesture." Blaise Cendrars, for his part, wrote that here "Balzac sketches the psychological, anatomical, physical, mechanical, and economic plan" of the capital. Indeed, modern Paris, "the most delicious of monsters" according to Balzac, is the protagonist of what constitutes the first episode of the trilogy, The Story of the Thirteen.
