The Vendetta by Balzac opens the Scenes From Private Life. What is to be expected from a short story so entitled, in 1830 ? A linear representation of history based on the most archaic violence and on a faithful respect of the values inherited from the past ? Under cover of such a horizon of expectations, the plot actually opens to a critique of tragic reason, to a eflection about the hazards of life and about the production of distraction ; it allows the novelist to dramatize his passion for the present – by exalting the present of passions. And it becomes the arkhè of an intrinsically human comedy. It gives us the opportunity to think the narrative and its folds on the (so strategic) model of the Trojan horse...