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To imagine them chargeable with all the guilt and folly of their own actions, is to be very little acquainted with the world. De l'absolu pouvoir vous ignorez l'yvresse, Et du lache flateur la voix enchanteresse. Thou hast not known the giddy whirls of fate, Nor servile flatteries which enchant the great.
Advertisement in the Quotidienne Letters between Balzac and Madame Hanska His growing attachment to her Meeting at Neufchatel Return to Paris Work "Etudes de Moeurs au XIXieme Siecle" "Le Medecin de Campagne" "Eugenie Grandet" Meets Madame Hanska at Vienna "La Duchesse de Langeais" Balzac's enormous power of work "La Recherche de l'Absolu" "Le Pere Goriot" Vienna Monetary difficulties Republishes romantic novels Continual debt Amusements.
Is it not curious, that there should have been a balneum Mariae at New London two hundred years ago? that la recherche de l'Absolu should have been going on there in a log-hut, under constant fear that the Indians would put out, not merely the flame of one little life, but, far worse, the fire of our furnace, and so rob the world of this divine secret, just on the point of revealing itself?
He saves his climax, in other words, from the burden of deliberate expatiation, which at first sight it would seem bound to incur; he leaves nothing for it to accomplish but just the necessary touch, the movement that declares and fulfils the intention of the book. There is the same power at work upon material even more baffling, apparently, in La Recherche de l'Absolu.
Since the year 1830 Balzac had lodged in the Rue Cassini, a little, unfrequented street near the Observatory, with a wall running along one side, on which was written "L'Absolu, marchand de briques," a name which Theophile Gautier fancies may have suggested to him the title of his novel "La Recherche de l'Absolu."
FOOTNOTES: I am glad to observe that Mr. Congreve, in the criticism with which he has favoured me in the number of the Fortnightly Review for April 1869, does not venture to challenge the justice of the claim I make for Hume. He merely suggests that I have been wanting in candour in not mentioning Comte's high opinion of Hume. After mature reflection I am unable to discern my fault. If I had suggested that Comte had borrowed from Hume without acknowledgment; or if, instead of trying to express my own sense of Hume's merits with the modesty which becomes a writer who has no authority in matters of philosophy, I had affirmed that no one had properly appreciated him, Mr. Congreve's remarks would apply: but as I did neither of these things, they appear to me to be irrelevant, if not unjustifiable. And even had it occurred to me to quote M. Comte's expressions about Hume, I do not know that I should have cited them, inasmuch as, on his own showing, M. Comte occasionally speaks very decidedly touching writers of whose works he has not read a line. Thus, in Tome VI. of the "Philosophie Positive," p. 619, M. Comte writes: "Le plus grand des métaphysiciens modernes, l'illustre Kant, a noblement mérité une éternelle admiration en tentant, le premier, d'échapper directement a l'absolu philosophique par sa célèbre conception de la double réalité,
In October "La Recherche de l'Absolu" appeared, and instead of greeting it with the enthusiasm he usually accorded to his books, he remarked to Madame Hanska that he hoped it was good, but that he was too tired to judge.
Its value is seen at its greatest in such books as Le Curé de Village, Père Goriot, La Recherche de l'Absolu, Eugénie Grandet most of all, perhaps, in this last.
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