United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There were hours with Hugo in Notre Dame in one of its most shadowy corners; with Zola on top of a 'bus at night as it lumbered up into the Belleville slums; with Balzac in an old garden I found; with Guy de Maupassant everywhere, in the gay hum and lights of those endless cafés, from bridges at sunset over the Seine, or far up the long rich dusk of the Champs Élysées, lights twinkling out, and his women laughing, chattering by.
The Petit-Chateau, as her delightful household was called, renews the elegant manners, the exquisite gallantries of the court of Anne of Austria, and offers to the romancers the models of which Balzac, later, made so much too free use.
True, their production aroused condemnation on the part of many contemporary dramatic critics, and were the source of much annoyance and little financial gain to their creator. But this is certainly no criterion for their workmanship. Balzac defied many tenets. He even had the hardihood to dispense with the claqueurs at the first night of Les Ressources de Quinola.
The position was intoxicating for the man who, a few years before, had been unknown and disregarded; and the fact that Balzac never forgot his old friendships in the excitement of the adulation lavished upon him, is a proof that his own belief in the real steadfastness of his character was not mistaken. Among these unknown correspondents, there were two who specially interested him.
The deadlock in which he found himself had been preparing since his visit to Saint Petersburg. Whether the intimacy created there between Madame Hanska and himself was that of two lovers in the chaster sense, or, as Monsieur Gabriel Ferry assets, in his Balzac et ses Amies, that of a closer union, it had haunted him during his subsequent twelvemonth's loneliness.
The only work of modern fiction which seems to me so nakedly to lay open the recesses of the human spirit as does "A Woman of Thirty" is Meredith's "The Egoist"; and, of course, master against master, Balzac is easily the superior, since the English author's wonderful book is so mannered and grotesque.
And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has no more unanswerable riddle to propound. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the novelist.
"However, he yielded to our advice not to hire the shop until the following year, in order to save needless expense." When the first satisfaction of being a landed proprietor had passed, Balzac realised that he had added a new burden to those he already carried, and he confided to Mme. Carraud: "Yes, the folly is committed and it is complete!
To dwell upon the shades of her long disappointment is needless, for her power of endurance and her fidelity are fully created in the book before they are put to the test. "Five years went by," says Balzac; but before he says it we already see them opening and closing upon the girl, bearing down upon her solitude, exhausting her freshness but not the dumb resignation in which she sits and waits.
To acknowledge it is at once to estate him, not only with Cervantes and Fielding themselves, but with Thackeray, with Swift, with Moliere, with Shakespeare. It places him well above Dickens, and, in the opinion of the present writer, it places him above even Balzac.
Word Of The Day