United States or Taiwan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This morning I sent you a wire to tell you that I had got my commission, thinking thereby to impress you with the importance of the event. The past five months of trooper life have not passed unpleasantly. There have been the inconveniences and hardships of the moment, "les petites miserès de la vie militaire," which sound trifling enough, but are rather a tax on one's endurance sometimes.
He was rather annoyed on this occasion, as he was working tremendously hard at the "Comedie Humaine," and at his "Petites Miseres de la Vie Conjugale," and the good nuns, who "thought the world turned only for themselves," told him that the ceremony would take place at one o'clock and would last an hour, whereas it was not over till four, and as he had to see Lirette afterwards, he could not get away till half-past five.
See him, for example, in the Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes, trying with one hand to write a novel of Parisian manners, with the other a romance of mystery, and to do full justice to both. Trompe-la-Mort, the Napoleon of crime, and Esther, the inspired courtesan, represent the romance, and Balzac sets himself to absorb the extravagant tale into a study of actual life.
Only in his selection of his subjects do we find the preoccupation of his mind; in his rendering he is detached and impersonal, helping us out at times in our knowledge of his mental attitude with such quaint rhymes as those accompanying Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre, but chiefly confining his hand to the representation of forms, relations and distances, with as little concern as possible for the expression of his own temperament, or for psychological portraiture of any sort.
In 1844 he published among other books "Modeste Mignon," "Gaudissart II," a fragment of the first part of "L'Envers de L'Histoire Contemporaine," which he entitled "Madame de la Chanterie," the end of the first part of "Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes," the third and last part of "Beatrix," and the first part of "Les Paysans."
Please tell her that they've seen me and that it's 'all right, as the English say. She'll understand. Oh, and be so good as to tell her I'm appointed secretary of the committee.... But she'll understand! You know, les petites misères de la vie humaine," he said, as it were apologizing to the princess. "And Princess Myakaya not Liza, but Bibish is sending a thousand guns and twelve nurses.
At the same time it makes interesting reading; and it will prove especially entertaining to readers of the Comedie Humaine who have dreaded and half-admired the redoubtable law-breaker, who makes his initial entrance in Le Pere Goriot and plays so important a part in Illusions Perdues, and Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes. Here we find Vautrin in a favorite situation.
It is distinctly awkward that this should be divided, as it is itself an enormous episode, a sort of Herodotean parenthesis, rather than an integral part of the story. And, as a matter of fact, it joins on much more to the Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes than to its actual companions.
At home in Edinburgh, with the old Scottish master of jerry-building and of "plinths," the atmosphere was truly Scots, tea-coseys and all, while the reminiscences of Paris and Fontainebleau, and the grandeurs et misères of "the young Americo-Parisienne sculptor" were perfectly fresh to the world, though some of the anecdotes were known to Stevenson's intimates. Mr.
It's a matter of a thousand francs; but for a thousand francs what can one get in modern furniture? Des platitudes bourgeoises, des misères sans valeur et sans goût." Old Mme. de Balzac was her son's factotum and universal agent. His letters from Vierzschovnia are filled with prescriptions of activity for his mother, accompanied always with the urgent reminder that she is to use cabs ad libitum.
Word Of The Day