Product Description: En 1816, à Alençon, Rose Cormon, quarante ans, attend toujours le mari digne de son rang. Issue de la bonne bourgeoisie, elle est parmi les plus riches personnes de la ville. La description minutieuse de sa maison et de la vie qu’elle y mène sont typiques de la manière balzacienne...read more

Product Description: L’action se situe durant le règne de Charles X (1824-1830) et se déroule entièrement dans la ville, dite médiévale, de Provins, dans le département de Seine-et-Marne. Pierrette Lorrain est une jeune orpheline, confiée par ses grands-parents ruinés à ses cousins Rogron, deux célibataires imbéciles...read more

Product Description: Notice: This Book is published by Historical Books Limited (www.publicdomain.org.uk) as a Public Domain Book, if you have any inquiries, requests or need any help you can just send an email to publications@publicdomain.org.uk This book is found as a public domain and free book based on various online catalogs, if you think there are any problems regard copyright issues please contact us immediately via DMCA@publicdomain...read more

Product Description: Notice: This Book is published by Historical Books Limited (www.publicdomain.org.uk) as a Public Domain Book, if you have any inquiries, requests or need any help you can just send an email to publications@publicdomain.org.uk This book is found as a public domain and free book based on various online catalogs, if you think there are any problems regard copyright issues please contact us immediately via DMCA@publicdomain...read more

Product Description: Notice: This Book is published by Historical Books Limited (www.publicdomain.org.uk) as a Public Domain Book, if you have any inquiries, requests or need any help you can just send an email to publications@publicdomain.org.uk This book is found as a public domain and free book based on various online catalogs, if you think there are any problems regard copyright issues please contact us immediately via DMCA@publicdomain...read more

"Come, deputy of the Centre, forward! Quick step! march! if we want to be in time to dine with the others. Jump, marquis! there, that's right! why, you can skip across a stubble-field like a deer!" These words were said by a huntsman peacefully seated at the edge of the forest of Ile-Adam, who was finishing an Havana cigar while waiting for his companion, who had lost his way in the tangled underbrush of the wood. At his side four panting dogs were watching, as he did, the personage he addressed.

Product Description: Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright best known for a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon...read more

Product Description: Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright best known for a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon...read more

Product Description: Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright best known for a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon...read more

Product Description: Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright best known for a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon...read more

Balzac's literary output began with chronicles and sketches on widely varied social and artistic topics. The journals to which he contributed were increasingly looking for short fiction, which Balzac was able to provide. A collection Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes from Private Life) came out in 1829, and was well received: these were tales told with a journalistic eye which looked into the fabric of modern life and did not shun social and political realities. Balzac had found a distinctive voice.

One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is, surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace - a people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages - youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection, experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth.

This is the question that fills the minds of the inhabitants of Saumur, the setting for Eugénie Grandet, one of the earliest and most famous novels in Balzac’s Comédie humaine. The Grandet household, oppressed by the exacting miserliness of Grandet himself, is jerked violently out of routine by the sudden arrival of Eugénie’s cousin Charles, recently orphaned and penniless. Eugénie’s emotional awakening, stimulated by her love for her cousin, brings her into direct conflict with her father, whose cunning and financial success are matched against her determination to rebel. Eugénie’s moving story is set against the backdrop of provincial oppression, the vicissitudes of the wine trade, and the workings of the financial system in the aftermath of the French Revolution. It is both a poignant portrayal of private life and a vigorous fictional document of its age.

Product Description: Is it a petty or a profound trouble? I knew not; it is profound for your sons-in-law or daughters-in-law, but exceedingly petty for you. "Petty! You must be joking; why, a child costs terribly dear!" exclaims a ten-times-too-happy husband, at the baptism of his eleventh, called the little last newcomer,—a phrase with which women beguile their families...read more

Product Description: Le médecin Horace Bianchon découvre près de Vendôme une maison abandonnée dont les ruines et l’étrange beauté l’intriguent. Chaque soir, il cherche à pénétrer dans cette propriété sans y parvenir. De retour à l’auberge, il pose mille questions sans qu’on lui réponde...read more

Product Description: Après avoir refusé avec hauteur nombre de prétendants, sous le prétexte qu’ils ne sont pas pairs de France, Émilie de Fontaine tombe amoureuse d’un mystérieux jeune homme discrètement apparu au bal champêtre de Sceaux. Bien que d’allure raffinée, de tournure aristocratique, l’inconnu (Maximilien Longueville) ne décline jamais son identité et semble ne s’intéresser qu’à sa sœur, jeune fille fragile...read more

Product Description: François Birotteau, vicaire de la cathédrale Saint-Gatien de Tours, est victime de la haine secrète de l’abbé Troubert et de sa logeuse, mademoiselle Gamard. Candide et franc, il ne comprendra jamais les intrigues qui l’ont privé d’une vie confortable et de relations amicales et respectueuses dans la ville, ni les raisons de la haine de sa logeuse...read more

Product Description: Dinah de La Baudraye (née Dinah Piédefer), épouse de Jean-Anastase-Polydore Milaud de La Baudraye dans la Muse du département et poétesse locale considérée comme bas-bleu, qui signe ses écrits du nom de « Jean Diaz », vient de soumettre au poète Raoul Nathan une nouvelle : Le Prince de la bohème...read more

Product Description: Ce récit en forme de pamphlet drolatique force un peu le trait sur un personnage censé représenter l’homme de la monarchie de Juillet. Félix Gaudissart est suractif, il séduit, il est efficace, comme cette société moderne sur laquelle Balzac ironise souvent, dont il déplore le matérialisme frénétique, et qui produit pour produire sans connaître le but de son agitation...read more

Product Description: Monsieur de Manerville, the father, was a worthy Norman gentleman, well known to the Marechael de Richelieu, who married him to one of the richest heiresses of Bordeaux in the days when the old duke reigned in Guienne as governor...read more

Product Description: Illusions perdues was written by the French writer Honoré de Balzac between 1837 and 1843 and it consists of three parts, starting in provincial France, thereafter moving to Paris, and finally returning to the provinces. It resembles another of Balzac’s greatest novels, The Black Sheep, in that it is set partly in Paris and partly in the provinces...read more

Product Description: To what genius fed on tears shall we some day owe that most touching of all elegies,—the tale of tortures borne silently by souls whose tender roots find stony ground in the domestic soil, whose earliest buds are torn apart by rancorous hands, whose flowers are touched by frost at the moment of their blossoming? What poet will sing the sorrows of the child whose lips must suck a bitter breast, whose smiles are checked by the cruel fire of a stern eye? The tale that tells of such poor hearts, oppressed by beings placed about them to promote the development of their natures, would contain the true history of my childhood...read more