Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes - Où mènent les mauvais chemins (French Edition)

It was my first by Balzac ever, and I am deeply impressed. I will take me a few days to write a review, as I am already hopelessly behind with my reviews. Peines de coeur d'une chatte anglaise Finished reading: This colossal series of works, with the subtitle Study of mores , aims to describe all aspects of society. Each novel or story focuses on a different layers, genders, social classes, ages, professions and institutions in French society during the Restauration and July Monarch period — , showing the causes and effects in society. They are parables which make the reader reflect on human society through the eyes of animals.

By Honore de Balzac

Hetzel was active as an editor as well as writer. He knew and was friends with many French authors who were active during the first half of the nineteenth century, including many great illustrators and artists, whom he asked to contribute to the magazines and collaborative book projects he initiated. Besides his editorial work, Pierre-Jules Hetzel produced a considerable oevre which can appreciated in its own right. Grandville or Jean-Jacques Grandville.

Grandville specialized in zoomorphic pictures, and illustrated books and magazines of various authors during his life time. The books were very successful and were reprinted several times throughout the nineteenth century. Volume one of consists of sixteen episodes. Stahl is the main contributor, writing the Prologue and three episodes. The five episodes or novellas written by Balzac are collected and published as a separate volume.

Knowledge of the broader framework is needed to understand direct references to the framework. In the Prologue the animals form an editorial board for the whole work, so when Balzac opens his second story as follows: Generally, Peines de coeur d'une chatte anglaise is difficult to read because of many references to politicians, scientists and other real-life people during the first half of the nineteenth century, and cross references between the episodes, to episodes contributed by other authors. Therefore, Peines de coeur d'une chatte anglaise may not be such a light read, and for full appreciation, the reader without an annotated edition may have to spend some time looking up references.

It is an amusing story which can be read without much difficulty. It very clearly portrays Victorian mores about what does and what does not constitute proper behaviour in public. Like all other stories it is completely, cleverly and convincingly, written from the point of animals, in this case cats, and therefore presents humourous descriptions of how cats eat, drink milk or spend the whole night sleeping on the lap of their owner whilst he plays whist.

It is this story which was attributed to George Sand , as Balzac said he did not want to dominate volume 1. As a kind of introduction, the story opens describing the social structure of classes in Paris, or rich and poor sparrows, suggesting that the growing gap between the classes needs to be addressed by finding a more suitable form of government.

Subsequently, the sparrow travels to three imaginary realms, the realm of the Ants, the Kingdom of the Bees, with their glorious Queen, clearly a reference to Victorian Britain, and the realm of the Wolves, to descide on the most appropriate form of state. Superficially, it describes the visit of the Lion, the crown prince, to Paris. The Lion describes contemporary Paris where anything is sold and anything can be bought.

• Die Versuchung - No. 19 from 28 Deutsche Volkslieder WoO 32?
• Lautsprecher in den Bäumen: Roman (German Edition).
• Sandro: The Forsaken World-Part 1 (The Botticelli Series).

The story is written in epistolary from, of letters written home to his father. The story was difficult to understand because many references are not clear. It is a love story that reads like a fairytale about the love of a Ladybug for a Caterpillar. These three layers are a bit confusing, but do not prevent the reader from an enchanting, magic reading experience. This story, was by far the most beautiful. It reads as follows complete: Et en philosophie, que nos progress sont lents!

Story Index

Loved your review and the wonderful illustrations. Is there any significance to the cat being anglaise in terms of manners?

• Der Ausnahmezustand als Normalfall: Modernität als Krise (German Edition).
• The Human Comedy.
• Outside Kitty.
• Table des titres de La Comédie humaine : classement de l'édition Furne.
• Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes ( edition) | Open Library.
• Item Preview.

Now I have to find out more about Grandville. I see what looks like Breviere on some of the illustrations, along with Grandville. Balzac generally wrote dining early and lightly, and sleeping for some hours immediately after dinner from midnight till any hour in the following day—stretches of sixteen hours being not unknown, and the process being often continued for days and weeks. Much pains have been spent upon this title and Balzac's intentions in selecting it. But the "Human Comedy," as a description for mere studies of life as his, will explain itself at once or else can never be explained.

1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Balzac, Honoré de

Of its constituents, however, some account must be given, and this can be best done through an exact and complete list of the whole work by years, with such abbreviated notes on the chief constituents as may lead up to a general critical summary. Of the two capital works of , we have spoken. They often borrow the licence of their 15th and 16th century models; but in La Succube and others there is undoubted genius and not a little art.

On the whole, this year's work, though not the author's largest, is perhaps his most unique. This last, a Swedenborgian rhapsody of great beauty in parts, has divided critics almost more than anything else of its writer's, some seeing in it with excuse nothing but the short description given above in three words, the others with justice reckoning it his greatest triumph of style and his nearest attempt to reach poetry through prose.

Three out of the next four years were astonishingly fruitful. This was the last scene of the comedy that appeared in the life of its author. This immense and varied total stands to its author in a somewhat different relation from that of any other work to any other writer. It has been well said that the whole of Balzac's production was always in his head together; and this is the main justification for his syllabus of it as the "Comedy. One apparently considerable book, La Bataille , which was to be devoted to the battle of Essling, and for which he actually visited the ground, is frequently referred to as in progress from the time of his early letters to Madame Hanska onwards; but it has never been found.

Another result of this relation was the constant altering, re-shaping, re-connecting of the different parts. But that he never would—even if by some impossibility he could—is almost equally certain. Whether there is any mark of decline in his latest work has been disputed, but there could hardly have been farther advance, and the character of the whole, not easy to define, is much less hard to comprehend, if prejudice be kept out of the way. That character was put early, but finally, by Victor Hugo in his funeral discourse on Balzac, whose work he declared, with unusual terseness, among other phrases of more or less gorgeous rhetoric, to be "observation and imagination.

It is this blending which gives him his unique position. He is an observer of the most exact, the most minute, the most elaborate; but he suffuses this observation with so strange and constant an imaginative quality that he is, to some careful and experienced critics, never quite "real"—or almost always something more than real. He seems accustomed to create in a fashion which is not so much of the actual world as of some other, possible but not actual—no matter whether he deals with money or with love, with Paris or with the provinces, with old times or with new.

A further puzzle has arisen from the fact that though Balzac has virtuous characters, he sees humanity on the whole "in black": In the same way there has been much discussion of his style, which seldom achieves beauty, and sometimes falls short of correctness, but which still more seldom lacks force and adequacy to his own purpose.

On the whole, to write with the shorthand necessary here, it is idle to claim for Balzac an absolute supremacy in the novel, while it may be questioned whether any single book of his, or any scene of a book, or even any single character or situation, is among the very greatest books, scenes, characters, situations in literature. But no novelist has created on the same scale, with the same range; none has such a cosmos of his own, pervaded with such a sense of the originality and power of its creator.

Open Library

Balzac's life during these twenty years of strenuous production has, as regards the production itself, been already outlined, but its outward events, its distractions or avocations—apart from that almost weekly process of "raising the wind," of settling old debts by contracting new ones, which seems to have taken up no small part of it—must now be shortly dealt with. Besides constant visits to the Margonne family at Sache in Touraine, and to the Carrauds at Frapesle in Berry, he travelled frequently in France. He went in to Neuchatel for his first meeting with Madame Hanska, to Geneva later for his second, and to Vienna in for his third.

He took at least two flights to Italy, in more or less curious circumstances. In , he went on a journey to Sardinia to make his fortune by melting the silver out of the slag-heaps of Roman mines—a project, it seems, actually feasible and actually accomplished, but in which he was anticipated.

The year before, tired of Paris apartments, he had bought ground at Ville d'Avray, and there constructed, certainly at great, though perhaps exaggerated expense, his villa of Les Jardies, which figures largely in the Balzacian legend. His rash and complicated literary engagements, and it must be added his disregard of them when the whim took him, brought him into frequent legal difficulties, the most serious of which was a law-suit with the Revue de Paris in He also more than once took steps to become a candidate for the Academy, but retired on several occasions before the voting, and when at last, in , he actually stood, he only obtained two votes.

As early as the Genevan meeting of , Madame Hanska had formally promised to marry Balzac in the case of her husband's death, and this occurred at the end of She would not, however, allow him even to visit her till the next year had expired, and then, though he travelled to St Petersburg and the engagement was renewed after a fashion, its fulfilment was indefinitely postponed. Only in September was he invited on the definite footing of her future husband to her estate of Wierzschovnia in the Ukraine; and even then the visit, interrupted by one excursion to Paris and back, was prolonged for more than two years before on the 14th of March the wedding actually took place.

But Balzac's own Peau de chagrin was now reduced to its last morsel. His health, weakened by his enormous labours, had been ruined by the Russian cold and his journeyings across Europe. Le derniere incarnation de Vautrin. A Seaside Tragedy Un drame au bord de la Mer: See A Drama on the Seashore, above. Ferragus Histoire des Treize: La Duchesse de Langeais.

See Lost Illusions , above.

Story Index « La Comedie Humaine by Balzac

See The Unconscious Comedians, above. See The Hidden Masterpiece, above. The Vicar of Tours, above. See The Magic Skin above. In a sign of a good start, the […].

You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Gaudissart the Great Gaudissart II: Two Poets Illusions Perdues: See Father Goriot above.

January 4, at La Comedie Humaine, by Honore de Balzac — finished at last! January 27, at 9: