Why was Balzac’s Grandet so stingy with candles?

This series is adapted, with permission, from a Chinese-language series by our friend Marcus Ji, who looks at historical events through an economic lens. We have condensed and adapted the original for an international audience.

Eugénie Grandet, published by Honoré de Balzac in 1833, is set in the French town of Saumur in 1819. Its central character, Père Grandet, is one of literature’s most famous misers – a man worth millions of francs who rations every candle, every lump of sugar, every stick of firewood in his house. Readers have laughed at him for nearly two centuries as a caricature of greed.

But convert the prices Balzac put in the book into today’s money, and the joke turns around. The beeswax candle that sets Grandet off did not burn away 1.2 francs. It burned away more than a hundred hours of his servant’s labour – around 3,000 RMB in China, or 2,000 US dollars, in today’s terms. Grandet’s rage at a candle was not a character flaw. It was arithmetic – and his arithmetic was far clearer than most of ours. The coldest fact comes at the end: the same six hours of light that cost a servant a week’s wages in 1819 costs about five cents today. The gap between those two numbers is roughly 60,000 times, and it is the clearest way to see what the electric revolution actually did.

Two candle scenes, both cold jokes

Balzac stages the miserliness around candles twice. In the first, on his daughter Eugénie’s birthday, Grandet brings out two tallow candles for his guests and jokes, “As this is Eugénie’s birthday, let us illuminate.” Two tallow candles are the grandest lighting ceremony a millionaire performs all year.

In the second, the morning after his nephew Charles arrives, Grandet walks into the guest room, sees the light is different, and realises the candle on the mantel is not tallow but beeswax: “What’s this? A wax candle! Where did they get that? The little wretches would pull down the roof of my house to boil eggs for that boy!” Most readers remember the anger. Almost nobody stops to do the sum.

The sum, down to the last centime

The currency first: 1 franc = 20 sous = 100 centimes.

A tallow candle – made from animal fat – sold for about 2.5 to 3 francs a kilogram. A standard household candle of around 120 grams cost roughly 0.30 francs, about 6 sous. It gave 5 to 7 hours of dim, smoky, foul-smelling light. A beeswax candle cost about 10 francs a kilogram – roughly four times as much – so the same-sized candle cost about 1.20 francs, or 24 sous. It burned bright and smokeless for 7 to 10 hours.

Now the wage. Balzac tells us the servant, Nanon, earned 60 francs a year, and calls her one of the best-paid servants in Saumur. Work it through: 60 francs over 365 days is about 3.3 sous a day; a house servant worked 14 to 16 hours a day; so Nanon earned roughly 1 centime an hour. Divide the candles by that wage:

• One tallow candle (30 centimes) = 25–30 hours of Nanon’s labour ≈ two working days.
• One beeswax candle (120 centimes) = 100–120 hours of her labour ≈ seven to eight working days.

The same candle, in today’s money

Take two deliberately conservative modern hourly wages – 30 RMB in China, 20 US dollars in America – and the labour converts like this:

In other words, in Grandet’s day, “keeping a light on for one evening” meant this: light a tallow candle and you threw more than ¥800 into the fire for 5–7 hours of glow, plus a room full of black smoke and the smell of animal fat. Light a beeswax candle and you burned the equivalent of ¥3,000 down to a wisp of smoke. When Grandet saw a beeswax candle that had been left burning all night in Charles’s room, his reaction was fury – because to him, it was as if his daughter had thrown money into the furnace to impress a suitor. That is the ordinary reaction of a rational person watching pure consumption go up in flames.

Light was a luxury, not a switch

This is the real point of the sum. Before the industrial revolution made cheap lighting universal, light was an expensive luxury, not a default. The same household expense we now call “the electricity bill” was, in 1819, closer to a tax on extravagance.

And the candle is only one entry in a complete household ledger Balzac buried in the book, every figure precise to the centime:

• Madame Grandet’s pocket money: at most 6 francs at a time – about five weeks of Nanon’s wages.
• Eugénie’s monthly allowance: 5 francs, to cover candles and sugar together.
• The biggest pot ever staked at Madame Grandet’s card table: 16 sous – 0.80 francs – which Balzac notes was the largest wager that room had ever seen.
• The gold coins Eugénie saved over 13 years: about 5,800 francs – one coin each birthday, name day and New Year, mostly 1756 Dutch ducats worth 13 francs apiece.
• A barrel of wine could fall from 11 francs to 6 in a single morning; Grandet hoarded the fine 1811 vintage and released it slowly, taking in more than 240,000 francs from that batch alone.
• Grandet’s profit from reselling gold once in Angers: 14,000 francs.
• Grandet’s estate in 1816: property valued near 4,000,000 francs, plus almost as much again in cash.
• What Eugénie eventually inherited: 17,000,000 francs.
• What Charles brought back from the West Indies, made partly through slave-trading: 1,900,000 francs.

In a single novel, Balzac lets a 16-sou card pot and a 17-million-franc fortune breathe on the same page. It is why Marx named him a favourite novelist – not for any hostility to capital, but because Balzac’s accounts always add up to the last centime.

60,000 times: the electric revolution in one number

Back to that beeswax candle. In Saumur in 1819, six hours of good light cost seven days of Nanon’s wages – about ¥3,000 in modern purchasing power. In China in 2025, six hours of LED light is 10 watts over six hours: 0.06 kilowatt-hours, or roughly five cents. The same six hours of light has fallen in price about 60,000 times.

Put another way: a full year of your household lighting bill today would not buy a single night of beeswax candlelight in 1819. Grandet was not an aberration. He was every rational household before the age of electricity – a man who knew exactly what light cost. We find him ridiculous only because we stand on the far side of the change that crushed the price of light to five cents an hour. Seen from 1819, asking “why did people go to bed when it got dark?” is like asking someone today “why don’t you fly abroad and back twice a day?” Because it is too expensive.

Grandet’s fury at that candle was the instinctive response of a rational man watching money burn. He was not a miser. He simply did not live long enough to see the electric age.

A note on the figures: these are order-of-magnitude estimates, not precise sums. Nanon’s hourly wage assumes she worked every day of the year, and the candle prices are French market averages that a provincial town like Saumur may have undercut slightly. The modern wages of ¥30 / $20 an hour are deliberately conservative – use a first-tier-city professional wage, or the US median of about $25, and every equivalent above rises another 30–50%.

Previously in this series: Why was Jane Austen’s Darcy rational instead of proud?

Next in this series: Why did merchants of the past fail to calculate gross margins?