United States or Finland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Simple circumstances such as the beauty of scarlet cloth or blue beads, the absence of women, our care in washing ourselves, excited their admiration far more than any grand or complicated object, such as our ship. Bougainville has well remarked concerning these people, that they treat the "chefs d'oeuvre de l'industrie humaine, comme ils traitent les loix de la nature et ses phenomenes."
The only attempt which I know of to establish a period historically or physiologically is that of FLEURENS, who has advanced an ingenious theory on the subject in his treatise "De la Longévité Humaine."
Nana, in Voltaire, brought 20,000 francs; Pot-Bouille, in Gaulois, 30,000 francs; Bonheur des Dames, La Joie de Vivre, Germinal, L'Oeuvre, La Terre, in Gil Blas, each 20,000 francs; L'Argent, in the same journal, 30,000 francs; Le Rêve, in the Revue Illustrée, 25,000 francs; La Bête Humaine, in Vie Populaire, 25,000 francs; La Débâcle, in the same, 30,000 francs, and Docteur Pascal in Revue Hebdomadaire, 35,000 francs.
I think I never saw a man more of a piece; and the type was new to me: I had never before set eyes upon his parallel, and I thought instinctively of Balzac and the lower regions of the Comédie Humaine. Pinkerton stared a moment on the intruder with no friendly eye, tore a leaf from his note-book, and scribbled a line in pencil, turned, beckoned a messenger boy, and whispered, "To Longhurst."
How much one could wish that, instead of producing more, Balzac should have produced less. With a man of his native power and perseverance, what greater perfection there might have been! Certainly, no defect is more patent in the Comedie Humaine than the trail of hasty workmanship, the mark of being at so much a line.
She well knows that Fortune is no blindfolded goddess turning writhing humanity on a wheel, but a something rooted in ourselves, and she has pity for “la povre fragilité humaine.” Though so independent and advanced in thought, she is still found clinging in her writings to mediæval forms.
"The Comedie Humaine," says Balzac, "first dawned on my brain like a dream one of those impossible projects, it seemed, that are caressed and allowed to fly away; a chimera which smiles, shows its woman's face, and forthwith unfolds its wings, mounting again into a fancied heaven. But the chimera, as many chimeras do, changed into reality.
Garcia's first published work, Mémoire sur la Voix humaine, was presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1840. This Mémoire gives the results of observations which Garcia made on his own pupils; it deals mainly with the position of the larynx during the singing of tones in the various registers.
The same author's Question d'Argent, composed a few years later, was a more direct tribute to the modifying power of the Comedie Humaine. It was Balzac's Mercadet the Jobber remodelled with a larger stage science. Ludovic Halevy apparently wished every one to perceive what he owed to the father of French realism.
One of the most remarkable characteristics of her work is the apparently inexhaustible imagination with which she continued to the close of her long life to pour forth many volumes of fiction year after year. Balzac, as a writer, was equally productive. In the "Comedie Humaine" he attempted to cover the whole ground of human, or at least of French life, and the success he attained was remarkable.
Word Of The Day