A Marriage Contract is an 1835 novel. Set in Bordeaux, it describes the marriage of a Parisian gentleman, Paul de Manerville, to the beautiful but spoiled Spanish heiress, Natalie Evangelista.Paul de Manerville is a gentleman born of wealth and nobility who decides, over the objections of his worldly friend de Marsay, to give up his elegant bachelor's life and get married at the age of twenty-seven. He falls in love with a beautiful girl named Natalie Evangelista, the daughter of a proud Spanish matriarch whose financial assets have been diminishing since the death of her husband. Too naïve and full of illusions to see the hidden motives of Natalie Evangelista's mother, who wants Paul's wealth in order to procure for her daughter the lavish lifestyle she believes to be her birthright, or to recognize that his bride's loyalty is entirely with her mother and not with him, Paul gets himself stuck in a frigid and childless marriage. So strong are his illusions, that even at the end of the novel he remains unaware of his wife's infidelities.

《婚约》选自巴尔扎克的《人间喜剧》，描写了一个因婚姻不慎而倾家荡产的丈夫的遭遇，批判了以利害关系为核心的婚姻制度：议婚好比交易，往往从一开始就埋下了不和的种子，甚至从签订婚约的第一天起，就开始了一场隐蔽的家庭内战；同时也批判了整个资产阶级社会婚姻观和家庭观的腐朽。作者以敏锐的观察力和深刻的笔法刻画了法国社交界各色人物的性格和态度，对婚姻和家庭见解独到，文字极富哲理性，发人深思。