The Lily in the Valley explores a complex relationship - a semi-maternal love, a confused longing, a mutual dependence, an unspoken (mis-)understanding between two closely connected lovers(?), around a love that is never physically consummated. Again, complex! In the way relationships between people often are.

Balzac will flood the reader with passages that detail a character's worldview in incredible depth. You have to read these passages critically, obviously. This is made clear in the novel's conclusion.

The prose is thoroughly adorned. The guy wasn't exactly going for economy of language; he was slamming coffee and burrowing into psyches. If some of the attitudes expressed by Félix are antiquated or essentialist in our modern lens, the character is young and the novel was written in the nineteenth century.