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Balzac
This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.
292 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1910
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 8, 2024
I found Lawson’s “Balzac” quite tedious at times going into his own tangents and thoughts on the works of the author. The chapters after the chronological history of the genius, I had to skim because my interest was diminishing in reading Lawson’s comments but I found enough her to rending things I found of value that I had not read before in other biographies. First and foremost I love Balzac’s works but as I read on the man himself was very disappointing. His ridiculous obsession with marrying Madame Hanska, it was obvious that their love was not beneficial for either of them and his wife of one month, displayed coldness. He was chasing a chimera. Also interesting that he had illegitimate children while for almost two decades pursuing her. He could have married another and been happier but did he need the drama in this relationship which he looked at what the lady could provide him with instead of true love, if he had a happier path would that effect his writing and making it less than what it was. To Madame Hanson's credit, she paid all his debts before her death, her income was less than expected.
Highlights from a Delphi collection of his works
➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226743
In his Choses Vues, Victor Hugo informs us that, on the afternoon of the 18th, his wife had been to the Hotel Beaujon and heard from
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226744
the servants that the master of the house was dying. After dinner he went himself, and reached the Hotel about nine. Received at first in the drawing-room, lighted dimly by a candle placed on a richly carved oval table that stood in the centre of the room, he saw there an old woman, but not, as he asserts, the brother-in-law, Monsieur Surville. No member of Balzac’s own family was present in the house that evening. Even the wife remained in her apartments. The old woman told Hugo that gangrene had set
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226748
in, and that tapping now produced no effect on the dropsy. As the visitor ascended the splendid, red-carpeted staircase, cumbered with statues, vases, and paintings, he was incommoded by a pestilential odour that assailed his nostrils. Death had begun the decomposition of the sick man’s body even before it was a corpse.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226757
Death took him the same evening.[*] During the last hours of his life Giraud had sketched his portrait for a pastel;[+] and, on the morning of the 19th, a man named Marminia was sent to secure a mould of his features. This latter design had to be abandoned. An impression of the hands alone was obtainable. Decomposition had set in so rapidly that the face was distorted beyond recognition. A lead coffin was hastily brought to cover up the ghastly spectacle of nature in a hurry.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226768
Baroche attended rather from duty than appreciation. On the way to the cemetery, he hummed and hawed, and
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 226769
remarked to Hugo: “Monsieur Balzac was a somewhat distinguished man, I believe?” Scandalized, Hugo looked at the politician and answered shortly: “He was a genius, sir.” It is said that Baroche revenged himself for the rebuff by whispering to an acquaintance near him: “This Monsieur Hugo is madder still than is supposed.”
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223319
His memory was extraordinary. At seventy, happening to meet a friend of his childhood, whom he had not seen since he was fourteen, he unhesitatingly began speaking to him in the Provencal tongue, which he had ceased using for half a
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223320
century. Equally great was his benevolence. On one occasion, hearing that his friend General de Pommereul was in monetary difficulties, he called at the General’s house, and, finding only Madame de Pommereul, said to her, as he placed two heavy bags on the table: “I am told you are short of cash. These ten thousand crowns will be more useful to you than to me. I don’t know what to do with them. You can give me them back when you have recovered what has been stolen from you.” Having uttered these few
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223324
brusk words, he turned and hurried away. Later we shall meet with a younger General de Pommereul, to whom the novelist dedicated his Melmoth Reconciled, adding, “In remembrance of the constant friendship that united our fathers and subsists between the sons.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223358
The boy’s initial steps in the path of learning were taken under the care of a nursery governess, Mademoiselle Delahaye, whom he quitted to attend the principal day-school in the town, known as the Leguay Institution. When he was eight he entered the College school at Vendome, a quiet spot in Touraine, with something of the aspect of a university town. On the registers of the school may be read the following inscription: “No. 460, Honore Balzac, aged eight years and five months. Has had small-pox; without infirmities; sanguine temperament; easily excited and subject to feverishness. Entered the College on June 22nd 1807; left on the 22nd of August 1813.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223477
As soon as his health was considered sufficiently strong, he began attending classes at the institution of a Monsieur Chretien, and supplemented them by private lessons received at home. His conviction that he would become a famous man
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223479
was as strong as ever, and his naive assertion of it was frequent enough to provoke great teasing in the domestic circle. Far from being irritated, he laughed with those that laughed at him, his sisters saying: “Hail to the great Balzac!” On the part of his elders the bantering was intended to damp his exalted notions, which they regarded as ill-founded, judging him, as his Vendome professors, by the smallness of his Latin and Greek.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223592
At the end of April 1820, he went to Villeparisis with his completed tragedy. Counting on a triumph, he had requested that some acquaintances should be invited to the house to hear it read aloud. Among those present was the gentleman who had advised his turning clerk in the Civil Service. The reading commenced, and, as it progressed, the youthful author noticed that his
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223595
audience first showed signs of being bored, then of being bewildered, and lastly of being frankly dissatisfied and hostile. Laure was dumbfounded. The candid gentleman broke out into uncompromising, scathing condemnation; and those who were most indulgent were obliged to pronounce that the famous tragedy was a failure. Honore defended his production with energy; and, to settle the dispute, his father proposed it should be submitted to an old professor of the Ecole Polytechnique, whom he knew, and
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223598
who should act as umpire. This course was adopted; and the Professor, after careful examination of the manuscript, opined that Honore would act wisely in preferring any other career to literature. The verdict was received with more calmness than might have been expected. Instead of twisting his own neck, as he had hinted he might, if unsuccessful, the young author quietly remarked that tragedies were not his forte and that he intended to devote himself to novels.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223633
However great Balzac’s potential genius, it was too little developed, too little exercised at this period for him to produce anything of real, permanent worth. The fiction in which he was destined to excel, the only fiction he was peculiarly fitted to write, demanded maturity
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223635
of experience that he could hardly acquire before another decade had passed over his head.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223765
His desertion would have at once spelt disaster, if Madame de Berny had not boldly stepped into the vacant place, with a power of attorney conferred on her by her husband, and pledged her credit for nine thousand francs. During three months longer, the tottering house continued to hold up; and then, under the avalanche
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223767
of writs and claims, it fell. A petition in bankruptcy was filed in April, and the estate was placed in the hands of an official receiver. On reaching this crisis so big with consequences, Balzac had recourse to his mother, who, though little disposed in the past to humour his bent, consented now to every sacrifice in order to save his credit. Her first step was to get her cousin Monsieur Sedillot to occupy himself with the liquidation, she authorizing him at the same time to make whatever arrangement he should
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223771
judge best, and promising to accept it. She was most anxious to spare her husband, at present eighty-three years of age, the grief he must feel if informed of the full extent of the disaster. Alas! notwithstanding her precautions, the old man did learn the truth; and the shock hastened his end. Within twelve months after the bankruptcy he met with a slight accident, which, acting on his enfeebled constitution, was fatal to him.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223784
Monsieur Arthur Rhone, a friend of the de Berny family, who used to visit the son Alexander in the office of the Rue des Marais, often admired on the mantelpiece a fine bust of Flora, modelled by Marin. One day the printer said to him: “Do you know how much that bust cost
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223786
me? . . . Fifteen thousand francs. I got it from Balzac, who owed me a great deal of money. Once when I was at his house in Passy, he exclaimed: ‘Since I can’t pay you, take what you like from here to reimburse yourself.’“ This work of art, a Louis XVI. gilt-bronze time piece, with its two candelabra, once also in Balzac’s possession, was part payment of the balance due to the de Berny family, and was surrendered only in the forties.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223795
A fortnight after he had quitted the Rue des Marais, the letter he wrote to General de Pommereul showed him planning out a fresh future. “At last has happened,” he said in it, “what many persons were able to foresee, and what I myself
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223797
feared in beginning and courageously supporting an establishment the magnitude of which was colossal (!!!). I have been precipitated, not without the previsions of my conscious mind, from my modest prosperity. . . . For the last month I have been engaged on an historical work of the highest interest; and I hope that, in default of a talent altogether problematic with me, my sketch of national customs will bring me luck. My first thought was for you; and I resolved to write and ask you to shelter me for two or
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223800
three weeks. A camp-bed, a single mattress, a table, if only it is quadrupedal and not rickety, a chair and a roof are all that I require.” The General replied: “Your room awaits you. Come quick.” And he went. It was his definite entrance into literature, and his resumption of the search for wealth withal
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224081
The Red Inn was related to him by a former army surgeon, a friend of the man that was unjustly condemned and executed. An Episode under the Terror was narrated by the hero himself. A Desert Attachment was the outcome of a conversation with Martin, the celebrated tamer of wild beasts. On the other hand, Master Cornelius was written to correct the false impression of Louis XI. which he considered Walter Scott had given to his readers in Quentin Durward, this making him very angry.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224085
His curiosity concerning facts and realities of every description led him to seek an interview with Samson the executioner. Calling one day to see the Director of Prisons, he found himself in presence of a pale, melancholy- looking man of noble countenance, whose manners, language, and apparent education were those of one polished and cultured. It was Samson. Entering into conversation with this strange personage, the novelist
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224087
listened to the particulars of his life. Samson was a royalist. On the morrow of Louis XVI.’s execution he had suffered the utmost remorse, and had paid for what was probably the only expiatory mass said on that day for the repose of the King’s soul.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224270
The dedication of Eugenie Grandet is to Maria; and Maria, portrayed under the features and character of the heroine, was, we learn, an agreeable girl, of middle-class origins, who, in the year of 1833, attached herself to Balzac and bore him a child.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224362
By his various mistresses, Balzac had four children, including Maria’s little daughter, two of whom survived him.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224414
Nanon, Balzac’s cook, less discreet than Auguste, the valet-de-chambre, had tales to tell Werdet about certain lady visitors who arrived by means of this private staircase into the daintily arranged bedroom.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224510
Another example of this peculiar assumption of superiority occurred not long after at a dinner given by Werdet in honour of a young
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224511
author, Jules Bergounioux, whose novels were being much read. Among the guests were Gustave Planche, Jules Sandeau, and Balzac. During the meal the conversation, after many assaults of wit and mirth, fell on the necessity of defending writers against the piracy and mutilation of their books in foreign countries, more especially in Belgium. All expressed their opinion energetically, young Bergounioux like the rest, he happening to class himself with his fellows in the words — we men of letters. At
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224515
the conclusion of his little speech, Balzac uttered a guffaw: “You, sir, a man of letters! What pretension! What presumption! You! compare yourself to us! Really, sir, you forget that you have the honour to be sitting here with the marshals of modern literature.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224960
His brother Henry, too, going from bad to worse, was in a position that necessitated Madame de Balzac’s giving up the remnants of her capital; and, to crown all, a son of Laurence, the dead sister, quitting an unhappy home, was living as a vagabond on the streets of Paris, whence he had to be rescued. Since, to these worries and griefs, there was added certain disquieting news from Eve, whose aunt, from reading some of his books, supposed him to be a gambler and debauchee and was trying to turn her niece against him, it was not astonishing that he should have been completely unnerved.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225073
One is tempted to wonder whether his returning to Italy in the spring of 1837, and his visit to Venice, after Florence and Milan, were not an indirect consequence of his Facino Cane story. It is certain that he regarded the ancient land of the Caesars as a possible
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225075
El Dorado; and, curiously enough, he came back this time, if not with Sindbad’s diamonds, yet with some prospect of becoming a Silver King. Throughout the remainder of the twelvemonth, a plan, connected with this prospect, was simmering in his head, a plan which, we shall see, was less chimerical than most of those that he concocted.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225129
Meanwhile his project of retiring — to a distance of twenty minutes — from Paris society did not hinder him from occasionally putting in an appearance at one or another of the aristocratic houses where he had his entries,
among them that of Madame de Castries, whom he continued to see, although she confined her worship to his talent, and
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225131
merely patronized the man. Either from sheer mischievousness, or to revenge herself for some real or fancied slight — perhaps, indeed, to mock at his talk of refinement — she perpetrated upon him the practical joke of getting her Irish governess, a Miss Patrickson, to send him notes in English, signed Lady Neville, in one of which an appointment was made to meet him at the Opera. He went to the rendezvous; but no one was there waiting for him. This drew from him a sharp letter of reproach; and Miss Patrickson, who
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225135
was, in her private life, a humble admirer of the great man, and had on one or two occasions translated some of his fiction, was so smitten with remorse for her trick that she revealed to him the name of the one who had invented it.
Highlights from a Delphi collection of his works
➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗➗
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226743
In his Choses Vues, Victor Hugo informs us that, on the afternoon of the 18th, his wife had been to the Hotel Beaujon and heard from
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226744
the servants that the master of the house was dying. After dinner he went himself, and reached the Hotel about nine. Received at first in the drawing-room, lighted dimly by a candle placed on a richly carved oval table that stood in the centre of the room, he saw there an old woman, but not, as he asserts, the brother-in-law, Monsieur Surville. No member of Balzac’s own family was present in the house that evening. Even the wife remained in her apartments. The old woman told Hugo that gangrene had set
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226748
in, and that tapping now produced no effect on the dropsy. As the visitor ascended the splendid, red-carpeted staircase, cumbered with statues, vases, and paintings, he was incommoded by a pestilential odour that assailed his nostrils. Death had begun the decomposition of the sick man’s body even before it was a corpse.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226757
Death took him the same evening.[*] During the last hours of his life Giraud had sketched his portrait for a pastel;[+] and, on the morning of the 19th, a man named Marminia was sent to secure a mould of his features. This latter design had to be abandoned. An impression of the hands alone was obtainable. Decomposition had set in so rapidly that the face was distorted beyond recognition. A lead coffin was hastily brought to cover up the ghastly spectacle of nature in a hurry.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 226768
Baroche attended rather from duty than appreciation. On the way to the cemetery, he hummed and hawed, and
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 226769
remarked to Hugo: “Monsieur Balzac was a somewhat distinguished man, I believe?” Scandalized, Hugo looked at the politician and answered shortly: “He was a genius, sir.” It is said that Baroche revenged himself for the rebuff by whispering to an acquaintance near him: “This Monsieur Hugo is madder still than is supposed.”
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223319
His memory was extraordinary. At seventy, happening to meet a friend of his childhood, whom he had not seen since he was fourteen, he unhesitatingly began speaking to him in the Provencal tongue, which he had ceased using for half a
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223320
century. Equally great was his benevolence. On one occasion, hearing that his friend General de Pommereul was in monetary difficulties, he called at the General’s house, and, finding only Madame de Pommereul, said to her, as he placed two heavy bags on the table: “I am told you are short of cash. These ten thousand crowns will be more useful to you than to me. I don’t know what to do with them. You can give me them back when you have recovered what has been stolen from you.” Having uttered these few
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223324
brusk words, he turned and hurried away. Later we shall meet with a younger General de Pommereul, to whom the novelist dedicated his Melmoth Reconciled, adding, “In remembrance of the constant friendship that united our fathers and subsists between the sons.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223358
The boy’s initial steps in the path of learning were taken under the care of a nursery governess, Mademoiselle Delahaye, whom he quitted to attend the principal day-school in the town, known as the Leguay Institution. When he was eight he entered the College school at Vendome, a quiet spot in Touraine, with something of the aspect of a university town. On the registers of the school may be read the following inscription: “No. 460, Honore Balzac, aged eight years and five months. Has had small-pox; without infirmities; sanguine temperament; easily excited and subject to feverishness. Entered the College on June 22nd 1807; left on the 22nd of August 1813.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223477
As soon as his health was considered sufficiently strong, he began attending classes at the institution of a Monsieur Chretien, and supplemented them by private lessons received at home. His conviction that he would become a famous man
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223479
was as strong as ever, and his naive assertion of it was frequent enough to provoke great teasing in the domestic circle. Far from being irritated, he laughed with those that laughed at him, his sisters saying: “Hail to the great Balzac!” On the part of his elders the bantering was intended to damp his exalted notions, which they regarded as ill-founded, judging him, as his Vendome professors, by the smallness of his Latin and Greek.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223592
At the end of April 1820, he went to Villeparisis with his completed tragedy. Counting on a triumph, he had requested that some acquaintances should be invited to the house to hear it read aloud. Among those present was the gentleman who had advised his turning clerk in the Civil Service. The reading commenced, and, as it progressed, the youthful author noticed that his
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223595
audience first showed signs of being bored, then of being bewildered, and lastly of being frankly dissatisfied and hostile. Laure was dumbfounded. The candid gentleman broke out into uncompromising, scathing condemnation; and those who were most indulgent were obliged to pronounce that the famous tragedy was a failure. Honore defended his production with energy; and, to settle the dispute, his father proposed it should be submitted to an old professor of the Ecole Polytechnique, whom he knew, and
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223598
who should act as umpire. This course was adopted; and the Professor, after careful examination of the manuscript, opined that Honore would act wisely in preferring any other career to literature. The verdict was received with more calmness than might have been expected. Instead of twisting his own neck, as he had hinted he might, if unsuccessful, the young author quietly remarked that tragedies were not his forte and that he intended to devote himself to novels.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223633
However great Balzac’s potential genius, it was too little developed, too little exercised at this period for him to produce anything of real, permanent worth. The fiction in which he was destined to excel, the only fiction he was peculiarly fitted to write, demanded maturity
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223635
of experience that he could hardly acquire before another decade had passed over his head.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223765
His desertion would have at once spelt disaster, if Madame de Berny had not boldly stepped into the vacant place, with a power of attorney conferred on her by her husband, and pledged her credit for nine thousand francs. During three months longer, the tottering house continued to hold up; and then, under the avalanche
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223767
of writs and claims, it fell. A petition in bankruptcy was filed in April, and the estate was placed in the hands of an official receiver. On reaching this crisis so big with consequences, Balzac had recourse to his mother, who, though little disposed in the past to humour his bent, consented now to every sacrifice in order to save his credit. Her first step was to get her cousin Monsieur Sedillot to occupy himself with the liquidation, she authorizing him at the same time to make whatever arrangement he should
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223771
judge best, and promising to accept it. She was most anxious to spare her husband, at present eighty-three years of age, the grief he must feel if informed of the full extent of the disaster. Alas! notwithstanding her precautions, the old man did learn the truth; and the shock hastened his end. Within twelve months after the bankruptcy he met with a slight accident, which, acting on his enfeebled constitution, was fatal to him.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223784
Monsieur Arthur Rhone, a friend of the de Berny family, who used to visit the son Alexander in the office of the Rue des Marais, often admired on the mantelpiece a fine bust of Flora, modelled by Marin. One day the printer said to him: “Do you know how much that bust cost
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223786
me? . . . Fifteen thousand francs. I got it from Balzac, who owed me a great deal of money. Once when I was at his house in Passy, he exclaimed: ‘Since I can’t pay you, take what you like from here to reimburse yourself.’“ This work of art, a Louis XVI. gilt-bronze time piece, with its two candelabra, once also in Balzac’s possession, was part payment of the balance due to the de Berny family, and was surrendered only in the forties.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223795
A fortnight after he had quitted the Rue des Marais, the letter he wrote to General de Pommereul showed him planning out a fresh future. “At last has happened,” he said in it, “what many persons were able to foresee, and what I myself
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223797
feared in beginning and courageously supporting an establishment the magnitude of which was colossal (!!!). I have been precipitated, not without the previsions of my conscious mind, from my modest prosperity. . . . For the last month I have been engaged on an historical work of the highest interest; and I hope that, in default of a talent altogether problematic with me, my sketch of national customs will bring me luck. My first thought was for you; and I resolved to write and ask you to shelter me for two or
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 223800
three weeks. A camp-bed, a single mattress, a table, if only it is quadrupedal and not rickety, a chair and a roof are all that I require.” The General replied: “Your room awaits you. Come quick.” And he went. It was his definite entrance into literature, and his resumption of the search for wealth withal
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224081
The Red Inn was related to him by a former army surgeon, a friend of the man that was unjustly condemned and executed. An Episode under the Terror was narrated by the hero himself. A Desert Attachment was the outcome of a conversation with Martin, the celebrated tamer of wild beasts. On the other hand, Master Cornelius was written to correct the false impression of Louis XI. which he considered Walter Scott had given to his readers in Quentin Durward, this making him very angry.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224085
His curiosity concerning facts and realities of every description led him to seek an interview with Samson the executioner. Calling one day to see the Director of Prisons, he found himself in presence of a pale, melancholy- looking man of noble countenance, whose manners, language, and apparent education were those of one polished and cultured. It was Samson. Entering into conversation with this strange personage, the novelist
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224087
listened to the particulars of his life. Samson was a royalist. On the morrow of Louis XVI.’s execution he had suffered the utmost remorse, and had paid for what was probably the only expiatory mass said on that day for the repose of the King’s soul.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224270
The dedication of Eugenie Grandet is to Maria; and Maria, portrayed under the features and character of the heroine, was, we learn, an agreeable girl, of middle-class origins, who, in the year of 1833, attached herself to Balzac and bore him a child.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224362
By his various mistresses, Balzac had four children, including Maria’s little daughter, two of whom survived him.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224414
Nanon, Balzac’s cook, less discreet than Auguste, the valet-de-chambre, had tales to tell Werdet about certain lady visitors who arrived by means of this private staircase into the daintily arranged bedroom.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224510
Another example of this peculiar assumption of superiority occurred not long after at a dinner given by Werdet in honour of a young
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224511
author, Jules Bergounioux, whose novels were being much read. Among the guests were Gustave Planche, Jules Sandeau, and Balzac. During the meal the conversation, after many assaults of wit and mirth, fell on the necessity of defending writers against the piracy and mutilation of their books in foreign countries, more especially in Belgium. All expressed their opinion energetically, young Bergounioux like the rest, he happening to class himself with his fellows in the words — we men of letters. At
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224515
the conclusion of his little speech, Balzac uttered a guffaw: “You, sir, a man of letters! What pretension! What presumption! You! compare yourself to us! Really, sir, you forget that you have the honour to be sitting here with the marshals of modern literature.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 224960
His brother Henry, too, going from bad to worse, was in a position that necessitated Madame de Balzac’s giving up the remnants of her capital; and, to crown all, a son of Laurence, the dead sister, quitting an unhappy home, was living as a vagabond on the streets of Paris, whence he had to be rescued. Since, to these worries and griefs, there was added certain disquieting news from Eve, whose aunt, from reading some of his books, supposed him to be a gambler and debauchee and was trying to turn her niece against him, it was not astonishing that he should have been completely unnerved.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225073
One is tempted to wonder whether his returning to Italy in the spring of 1837, and his visit to Venice, after Florence and Milan, were not an indirect consequence of his Facino Cane story. It is certain that he regarded the ancient land of the Caesars as a possible
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225075
El Dorado; and, curiously enough, he came back this time, if not with Sindbad’s diamonds, yet with some prospect of becoming a Silver King. Throughout the remainder of the twelvemonth, a plan, connected with this prospect, was simmering in his head, a plan which, we shall see, was less chimerical than most of those that he concocted.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225129
Meanwhile his project of retiring — to a distance of twenty minutes — from Paris society did not hinder him from occasionally putting in an appearance at one or another of the aristocratic houses where he had his entries,
among them that of Madame de Castries, whom he continued to see, although she confined her worship to his talent, and
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 225131
merely patronized the man. Either from sheer mischievousness, or to revenge herself for some real or fancied slight — perhaps, indeed, to mock at his talk of refinement — she perpetrated upon him the practical joke of getting her Irish governess, a Miss Patrickson, to send him notes in English, signed Lady Neville, in one of which an appointment was made to meet him at the Opera. He went to the rendezvous; but no one was there waiting for him. This drew from him a sharp letter of reproach; and Miss Patrickson, who
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was, in her private life, a humble admirer of the great man, and had on one or two occasions translated some of his fiction, was so smitten with remorse for her trick that she revealed to him the name of the one who had invented it.
February 6, 2021
There’s a lot of information in this book.
In fact, at times there is too much. The plots of Balzac’s books are laid out in detail. There are long descriptions of the furnishings in his homes. The book just doesn’t read well and the author’s language doesn’t help.
In fact, at times there is too much. The plots of Balzac’s books are laid out in detail. There are long descriptions of the furnishings in his homes. The book just doesn’t read well and the author’s language doesn’t help.
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