Short Works

La Fille aux yeux d'or

La Fille aux yeux d'or (English: The Girl With the Golden Eyes) is a novella by Honoré de Balzac. It is the third part of the Thirteen series, which includes the short stories Ferragus and The Duchesse de Langeais. It is also part of his La Comédie humaine novel sequence.

The story follows the decadent heir Henri de Marsay, who becomes enamored of the titular beauty, Paquita Valdes, and plots to seduce her. Though he succeeds, he becomes disillusioned when he discovers she is also involved with another lover, and plots to murder her. When he arrives to kill her, he discovers she's already dead by the hand of her lover - his half-sister. She declares that Paquita came from a land where women are no more than chattels, able to be bought and used in any way. In the last lines of the story, de Marsay idly tells a friend that the girl has died of consumption.

Honorine (novel)

Honorine is an 1843 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and included in his series of novels (or Roman-fleuve) known as La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) which parodies and depicts French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy (1815-1848). Balzac has a subtle way of approaching his plot indirectly and embedding a story within a story. The story is perhaps a common one of a wife trapped in a marriage, but is approached in an interesting manner.

Maurice is a Consul at Genes, a Mediterranean town where he has married Onorina the daughter of the only wealthy man into the town, although it seems he was originally extremely reluctant to get married. They are having a dinner party with guests from Paris, and Maurice recounts some of his history.

When Maurice was young, he became secretary to Count Octave. The count was very good to him but seemed very sad and mysterious as if hiding some past misfortune. Eventually Maurice discovers that he had been married, but his wife had left him. She, Honorine, had been brought up with him from a very early age, having been adopted by his parents, and they were devoted to each other. They had become married almost as a matter of course. However after a few months she just disappeared. Octave then discovered she had gone off with an adventurer who had abandoned her, pregnant. She had the child but lived full of remorse, and resisted all attempts of Octave to get in touch with her. Octave is still devoted to her and secretly helps her in her business of flower arranging. However she still refuses to have anything to do with him. The Count therefore gets Maurice to act as a go between, arranging for him to occupy the house next to her, and pose as a misogynistic flower breeder. Eventually Maurice makes contact and indirectly puts the Count’s case. Honorine is still to overcome with remorse and shame. Eventually however she agrees to see the count, and then goes back to live with him.

Maurice has to leave the Count’s company because of the part he played and that is why he became consul. Two years after, he heard of the death of Honorine, and soon after was visited by the Count who had grown old before his time, and who died shortly after departing. The story is full of discussion about the meaning of relationships and Maurice acts throughout as interpreter for the two parties. There is also the implication that he had in fact fallen in love with Honorine himself, which is why he avoided marriage initially.

Louis Lambert (novel)

Louis Lambert is an 1832 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), included in the Études philosophiques section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set mostly in a school at Vendôme, it examines the life and theories of a boy genius fascinated by the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772).

Balzac wrote Louis Lambert during the summer of 1832 while he was staying with friends at the Château de Saché, and published three editions with three different titles. The novel contains a minimal plot, focusing mostly on the metaphysical ideas of its boy-genius protagonist and his only friend (eventually revealed to be Balzac himself). Although it is not a significant example of the realist style for which Balzac became famous, the novel provides insight into the author's own childhood. Specific details and events from the author's life – including punishment from teachers and social ostracism – suggest a fictionalized autobiography.

While he was a student at Vendôme, Balzac wrote an essay called Traité de la Volonté ("Treatise on the Will"); it is described in the novel as being written by Louis Lambert. The essay discusses the philosophy of Swedenborg and others, although Balzac did not explore many of the metaphysical concepts until much later in his life. Ideas analyzed in the essay and elsewhere in the novel include the split between inward and outward existence; the presence of angels and spiritual enlightenment; and the interplay between genius and madness.

Although critics panned the novel, Balzac remained steadfast in his belief that it provided an important look at philosophy, especially metaphysics. As he developed the scheme for La Comédie humaine, he placed Louis Lambert in the Études philosophiques section, and later returned to the same themes in his novel Séraphîta, about an androgynous angelic creature.

Le Contrat de mariage

Le Contrat de mariage (English: A Marriage Contract or A Marriage Settlement) is an 1835 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and included in the Scènes de la vie privée section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in Bordeaux, it describes the marriage of a Parisian gentleman, Paul de Manerville, to the beautiful but spoiled Spanish heiress, Natalie Evangelista.

Paul de Manerville is a gentleman born of wealth and nobility who decides, over the objections of his worldly friend de Marsay, to give up his elegant bachelor’s life and get married at the age of twenty-seven. He falls in love with a beautiful girl named Natalie Evangelista, the daughter of a proud Spanish matriarch whose financial assets have been diminishing since the death of her husband. Too naïve and full of illusions to see the hidden motives of Natalie Evangelista’s mother, who wants Paul’s wealth in order to procure for her daughter the lavish lifestyle she believes to be her birthright, or to recognize that his bride’s loyalty is entirely with her mother and not with him, Paul gets himself stuck in a frigid and childless marriage. So strong are his illusions, that even at the end of the novel he remains unaware of his wife’s infidelities.

A Marriage Contract is one of Balzac’s great studies of human illusions, in this case the illusions of married life. Paul is a subtly conveyed example of the husband, “the voluntary dupe” who prefers “to suffer rather than complain.” The novel is notable for treating not only the courtship leading up to the marriage, but the negotiations which follow. A Marriage Contract also has one of Balzac’s classic dissections of the techniques and wiles of professional negotiators.

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Brief Works by Honoré de Balzac

La Vendetta (Balzac)

La Vendetta (The Vendetta) is a novel by the French writer Honoré de Balzac. It is the eighth of the Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes of Private Life) in La Comédie humaine. The novel was first published in 1830 by Mame et Delaunay-Vallée. In 1842 it appeared in the first Furne edition of La Comédie humaine. La Vendetta was the fourth work in Volume 1, making it the fourth of the Scènes de la vie privée.

Balzac may have been inspired to write La Vendetta by Prosper Merimée, whose novel Mateo Falcone, which was serialized by the Revue de Paris in 1829, also deals with the subject of Corsican vengeance and family honour.

The manuscript of La Vendetta, which is preserved in the Lovenjoul Collection of the Institut de France in Paris, is in three separate parts: L'Atelier (The Artist's Workshop), La Désobéissance (The Act of Disobedience) and Le Mariage (The Marriage). The novel was completed in Paris in January 1830, when Balzac was assisting the Duchesse d'Abrantès with her Mémoires de l'Empire.

The first edition of La Vendetta was published in April 1830 by Mame et Delaunay-Vallée, appearing immediately after the preface in the first volume of a two-volume collection of Balzac's novels entitled Scènes de la vie privée – Balzac had not yet conceived of La Comédie humaine. The work was divided into a prologue and four sections entitled: L'Atelier, La Désobéissance, Le Mariage and Le Châtiment (The Punishment).

In May 1832 Mame-Delaunay brought out a second edition. By now the Scènes de la vie privée had grown to four volumes. La Vendetta retained its place immediately after the preface in the first volume.

In July 1835 Mme Béchet published a third edition of La Vendetta as part of a twelve-volume collection of Balzac's works entitled Etude de Moeurs au XIXe siècle (Studies of Manners in the 19th Century). In this edition La Vendetta was no longer divided into sections and was placed at the end of the first volume. Balzac altered the marriage scene for this edition.

In October 1839 Charpentier brought out a fourth edition of La Vendetta in a newly revised and corrected edition of the Scènes de la vie privée. La Vendetta was the first work in the second volume of the series.

In July 1842 a fifth edition of La Vendetta appeared in Furne's first publication of La Comédie humaine. La Vendetta was the fourth work in the first volume (Scènes de la vie privée) of this five-volume series.

La Vendetta is a short work relating the tragic fate of Ginevra Piombo, the daughter of proud Corsican immigrants, who has the misfortune of falling in love with another Corsican Luigi Porta. When it becomes known that Luigi is the sole survivor of a massacre in which the rest of his family were the victims of a bloody vendetta with Ginevra's family, Ginevra's father is determined to complete the act of vengeance by having him killed. But Ginevra refuses to yield to her father's demands and she and Luigi are married. Over the following years the pair eke out a miserable existence, dogged by hunger and poverty, while Ginevra's wealthy father refuses to lift a hand to support her: it is as much as he can do to refrain from murdering Luigi. Ginevra gives birth to a child, but she and the child die on the very day that Monsieur Piombo finally relents and decides to assist the impoverished couple. Before he can act, however, Luigi visits him and gives him the tresses of his deceased daughter. As Luigi departs, Piombo refrains once more from killing him, believing him to be already a dead man.

The ebook can be downloaded, here.

A Collection of Works by Honore de Balzac

This ebook contain at least more than ten of his work, but i only give the description a few of them such:

La Bourse

La Bourse (The Purse) is a short story by the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. It was published in 1832 by Mame-Delaunay as one of the Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes of Private Life) in La Comédie humaine. Later editions of the work were brought out by Béchet in 1835 and by Charpentier in 1839, in both of which La Bourse was placed among the Scènes de la vie parisienne (Scenes of Parisian Life). It was, however, restored to the Scènes de la vie privée when Furne brought out the fourth and final edition in 1842; this heavily revised version of the story appeared as the third work in Volume 1 of La Comédie humaine.

The young painter Hippolyte Schinner falls from a step-ladder while working in his atelier and is knocked unconscious. The noise of his fall alerts two of his neighbours, Adélaïde Leseigneur and her mother Madame de Rouville, who occupy the apartment immediately below. The two women revive the young man and an acquaintance is struck up. Inevitably, the young painter falls in love with Adélaïde and over the following weeks he pays frequent visits to her apartment. There he is always warmly welcomed, but he cannot help noticing the unmistakable signs of poverty - a poverty that the two women are at obvious pains to hide. Hippolyte's suspicions are aroused. The mother and her daughter have different surnames; they are reluctant to reveal anything of their past; and what is Hippolyte to make of the two old friends of the mother, the Comte de Kergarouet and the Chevalier du Halga, who regularly visit her to play cards for money, but who always lose to her as though on purpose?

Hippolyte discovers that Madame de Rouville's late husband was a naval captain who died at Batavia from wounds reveived in an engagement with an English vessel. The Comte de Kergarouet, it transpires, is a former comrade of Baron de Rouville. Hippolyte offers to draw a portrait of Monsieur de Rouville, a fading sketch of whom is hanging in the apartment. Two months later, when the finished portrait is hung in Madame de Rouville's apartment, the Comte de Kergarouet offers Hippolyte 500 pistoles to have his own portrait painted in a similar style. Hippolyte, however, suspects that the old man is offering him the price of both portraits while paying for his own, and he declines the offer.

Despite his suspicions that the two women make are living in some mysterious and disreputable manner, Hippolyte continues his visits, for he is deeply in love with Adélaïde. One day, as he is leaving the apartment, he realizes that he has left his purse behind; but when he returns and inquires about it, Adélaïde brazenly insists that no such purse has been left in their apartment. The young man suspects he has been robbed by the women and he stops visiting them. Over the following week he pines away. His colleagues seem to confirm his worst suspicions - that Adélaïde is a prostitute and Madame de Rouville her procuress. Even his mother notices that he is out of sorts.

But a chance meeting on the stairs outside Adélaïde's apartment is enough to dispel all Hippolyte's suspicions. He decides that he was wrong to ignore the promptings of his heart. That evening he calls on the two women. Madame de Rouville suggests a game of cards. Hippolyte loses, and when he reaches into his pocket for some money, he finds before him a purse which Adélaïde has slipped in front of him without his noticing it: "the poor child had the old one in her hand, and, to keep her countenance, was looking into it for the money to pay her mother. The blood rushed to Hippolyte's heart with such force that he was near fainting. The new purse, substituted for his own, and which contained his fifteen Louis d'or, was worked with gilt beads. The rings and tassels bore witness to Adélaïde's good taste, and she had no doubt spent all her little hoard in ornamenting this pretty piece of work. It was impossible to say with greater delicacy that the painter's gift could only be repaid by some proof of affection." There and then Hipployte asks for Adélaïde's hand in marriage.

Meanwhile Hippolyte's mother, having made inquiries about her son's condition and having learned of the whole affair, informs the Comte de Kergarouet of the malicious rumours surrounding the two women. Outraged, he explains to Madame Schinner that he loses intentionally at cards to Madame de Rouville because the Baronne's pride has left him none but these ingenious means of assisting her and her daughter in their poverty.

The Comte de Kergarouet and Madame Schinner go round to Madame de Rouville's, and arrive just in time to pronounce a benediction on the young lovers' engagement.

In La Bourse, Balzac deals with a range of themes which he was to explore in great detail throughout La Comédie humaine: the arts; creation in all its forms, as well as the joys and the pains which it causes. A great admirer of Eugène Delacroix, whom he was later to use as a model for the character of Joseph Bridau (a painter who appears in The Black Sheep, A Start in Life and La Bourse), he depicts the act of artistic creation from every angle: the innovative and misunderstood painter (the brilliant Frenhorfer in The Unknown Masterpiece); the novice painter who gains public recognition (Joseph Bridau); the wealthy man who dabbles in art (Pierre Grassou, who fritters away his talent making copies of the masters).

Balzac rarely misses an opportunity to illustrate his novels with references to famous paintings, and La Bourse is no different: " Adelaide came behind the old gentleman's armchair and leaned her elbows on the back, unconsciously imitating the attitude given to Dido's sister by Guérin in his famous picture."

Balzac also deals brilliantly with those disciplines of the arts which are dear to him and which distinguish La Comédie humaine, treating them with a meticulousness and a precision which still astonish experts today:

Sculpture: Sarrasine whose eponymous hero is a rebel genius.

Music: Gambara, in which is described a quasi-mathematical creation of a musical work of art, and in which Balzac also gives us a meticulous analysis of one of Giacomo Meyerbeer's operas.

Lyrical art: Massimilla Doni, in which a love story serves as a pretext for a lecture on the art of Rossini.

Balzac is a great storyteller and creator of fables. La Bourse is a subtle fable in which an artist - one who, by definition, is skilled in the art of observation - must try and make sense of the conflicting signs he observes in Madame de Rouville's apartment, as though he is trying to decipher a work of art. Balzac also portrays in this short novel a social category to which he often returns in La Comédie humaine: the forgotten victims of Napoleon. Although regarded as a minor work, La Bourse illustrates the world of painting in a rather unexpected way. It also sheds light on other works on the same theme, and on Balzac's understanding of art. As such, it represents an important stone in the edifice of La Comédie humaine.

Sarrasine

Sarrasine is a novella written by Honoré de Balzac. It was published in 1830 (the same year as he published La Peau de Chagrin), and is part of his Comédie Humaine.

Balzac's "Sarrasine" was not paid much attention prior to Roland Barthes' blow-by-blow (post-)structuralist analysis of the text in his book S/Z, published in 1970. Barthes dissects the text in accordance to five 'codes' (hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, proairetic, cultural).

Imagery and Themes

A glance at the introduction to the story reveals Balzac's excellent story-telling abilities, and his precision of detail at the linguistic level:

J'étais plongé dans une de ces rêveries profondes qui saisissent tout le monde, même un homme frivole, au sein des fêtes les plus tumultueuses. […] Assis dans l'embrasure d'une fenêtre, et caché sous les plis onduleux d'un rideau de moire, je pouvais contempler à mon aise le jardin de l'hôtel où je passais la soirée. Les arbres, imparfaitement couverts de neige, se détachaient faiblement du fond grisâtre que formait un ciel nuageux, à peine blanchi par la lune. Vus au sein de cette atmosphère fantastique, ils ressemblaient vaguement à des spectres mal enveloppés de leurs linceuls, image gigantesque de la fameuse danse des morts. Puis, en me retournant de l'autre côté, je pouvais admirer la danse des vivants ! […] [P]our achever d'étourdir cette foule enivrée par tout ce que le monde peut offrir de séductions, une vapeur de parfums et l'ivresse générale agissaient sur les imaginations affolées. Ainsi, à ma droite la sombre et silencieuse image de la mort ; à ma gauche, les décentes bacchanales de la vie : ici, la nature froide, morne, en deuil ; là, les hommes en joie. Moi, sur la frontière de ces deux tableaux si disparates, qui, mille fois répétés de diverses manières, rendent Paris la ville la plus amusante du monde et la plus philosophique, je faisais une macédoine morale moitié plaisante, moitié funèbre. Du pied gauche je marquais la mesure, et je croyais avoir l'autre dans un cercueil. Ma jambe était en effet glacée par un de ces vents coulis qui vous gèlent une moitié du corps tandis que l'autre éprouve la chaleur moite des salons… (1-2).

The words in italics denote important antitheses. The descriptions are all binary: inside/outside, cold/warmth, gaiety/gravity, and, most notably, masculine/feminine. The use of these antithetical elements illuminates Balzac's symbolic manipulation of extremes, which is significant since the story explores the notion of a bipolar gender system. The story of La Zambinella is one of androgyny and mistaken identity—as a young castrato in the Opera, this character throws into question both masculinity and femininity as well as heterosexual vs. homosexual desire. When the Parisian artist Sarrasine falls in love with La Zambinella- thinking that the castrato, who plays female roles in the Opera-- is not only a woman, but the perfect woman—he does not realize that he has fallen into a kind of homoerotic scenario. When Sarrasine discovers that La Zambinella is in fact a castrato and that he has constructed a notion of perfect femininity (represented by his chef d'oeuvre, a statue) on an androgynous image, Sarrasine attempts to kill La Zambinella in a rage. In this way, the text does much to construct the XIX century's more rigid notion of (compulsory) heterosexuality and (fear of) homosexuality, while also reinforcing more rigid gender roles (promising punishment to those who render gender ambiguous, or those who appreciate ambiguous gender).

The story also echoes in many ways Ovid's tale of Pygmalion in his Metamorphoses.

Sarrasine is the name of the Prince of Sydney in Vampire: The Masquerade

Seraphita (1835)

Seraphita first appeared in Le Livre Mystique, with Louis Lambert and Les Proscrits (Paris, 1835). A portion of it had already been published in the Revue de Paris in 1834. In 1840 it appeared in Le Livre des Douleurs; in 1842 it was republished with Louis Lambert. Since 1846 it has been included in the Comedic in the Etudes Philosophiques. Balzac's personal estimate of this work is very high. In his dedication to Madame de Hanska he said: "If I should be accused of incapacity after trying to extract from the depths of mysticism this book, which demanded the glowing poetry of the East under the transparency of our beautiful language, the blame be yours! Did you not compel me to the effort—such an effort as Jacob's—by telling me that even the most imperfect outline of the figure dreamed of by you, as it has been by me from my infancy, would still be something in your eyes? Here, then, is that something. Why cannot this book be set apart exclusively for those lofty spirits who, like you, are preserved from worldly pettiness by solitude!" In his Introduction to the Comedy (1842), Balzac thus explains his aim: "Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and paint them as they are, with passion for their motive power, have supposed, but wrongly, that I must belong to the school of Sensualism and Materialism—two aspects of the same thing—Pantheism. But their misapprehension was perhaps justified—or inevitable. I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's improvement in himself. Those who insist in reading in me the intention to consider man as a finished creation are strangely mistaken. Seraphita, the doctrine in action of the Christian Buddha, seems to me an ample answer to this rather heedless accusation. . . . The wonders of animal magnetism, with which I have been familiar since 182o; the beautiful experiments of Gall, Lavater's successor; all the men who have studied mind as opticians have studied light—two not dissimilar things—point to a conclusion in favor of the mystics, the disciples of St. John, and of those great thinkers who have established the spiritual world—the sphere in which are revealed the relations of God and man."

IN May, 1800, the mountainous amphitheater en-closing the Stromfiord between Drontheim and Christiania was still covered with snow and ice; the falls of the Sieg even had not yet melted. It was a daring thing, therefore, for two human beings to mount the shelves of the Falberg to the summit on their skis. Finally they paused, and she whose name was Minna, looking down into the abyss, was fascinated and overwhelmed with the spectacle at her feet, and was about to throw herself down the precipice in her vertigo, crying, "I am dying, my Seraphitus, having loved no one but you!"

Seraphitus breathed softly on her brow and eyes, and immediately she was calmed.

"Who and what are you?" she cried; "but I know, you are my life."

Without replying, Seraphitus left her side and stood on the very edge of the precipice, looking calmly into the gulf. Minna called him back in agony and asked the source of such super-human strength of mind. The strange being, raising his hand toward the blue patch between the clouds, replied:

"You can look into far greater space without a qualm." "But what a difference," she said, smiling.

"You are right," he replied. "We are born to aspire sky-ward. Our native home, like a mother's face, never frightens its children."

They proceeded till they reached a beautiful little meadow full of alpine plants. In Minna's delight in his presence and talk, she exclaimed that she never had seen Seraphitus so beautiful. Seraphitus had a complexion like the internal glow of an. alabaster vase, and eyes that seemed to give out light rather than receive it, a frame slight and fragile as a woman's, but of wonderful strength, and hair with light curls.

Seraphitus repelled Minna's proffered embrace, and said kindly : "Come!" To her gentle reproaches, Seraphitus re-plied by exhorting her to a celestial love, when she would love all creatures, and added: "Some day, perhaps, we may meet in the world where love never dies."

Then he said: "I can give nothing that you want. Why do you not love Wilfrid? He will be your lover, your husband. I wanted a companion to go with me to the realm of light. I thought to show her this ball of clay, and I find that you still cling to it. Adieu! Remain as you are, enjoy through your senses, obey your nature; turn pale with pale men, blush with women, play with children, pray with sinners, look up to heaven when you are stricken; tremble, hope, yearn; you will have a comrade, you still may laugh and weep, give and receive. For me—I am an exile far from heaven; like a monster, far from earth! My heart beats for none; I live in my-self, for myself alone. I feel through my spirit, I breathe by my brain, I see by my mind, I am dying of impatience and

longing. No one here below can satisfy my wishes or soothe my eagerness; and I have forgotten how to weep. I am alone --I am resigned, and can wait."

They returned to the valley.

"Make haste, pretty one, the night is falling," said Seraphitus.

The voice startled Minna : it was as clear as a girl's. Manly strength seemed leaving Seraphitus. They hurried through the village of Jarvis to the parsonage, where Pastor Becker sat reading. He affectionately welcomed the pair; and Seraphitus invited Minna and her father to tea two days later.

When Seraphitus arrived at the old Swedish castle, David, a man of eighty, came out to welcome the owner. Seraphitus declined refreshment, and lay down to sleep, while the old man lingered in loving contemplation of the strange being the question of whose sex was so puzzling. He wept as he thought: " She is suffering and will not tell me."

In the evening David came into the drawing-room. "I know who is coming," said Seraphita; "Wilfrid may come in."

Wilfrid had come to urge her to accept his undying devotion; but she reasoned with him as she had reasoned with Minna. Among other things, she said:

"You know full well that I can never be yours. Two feelings rule the love that attracts the women of this earth: either they devote themselves to suffering creatures, degraded and guilty, whom they desire to comfort, to raise, to redeem, or they give themselves wholly to superior beings, sublime and strong, whom they are fain to worship and understand—by whom they are too often crushed. You have been degraded, but you have purified yourself in the fires of repentance, and you now are great; I feel myself too small to be your equal, and I am too religious to humble myself to any power but that of the Most High."

Seraphita told him that she loved him truly, and Minna also, but to her they were one being. She begged him to marry Minna, so that she might see them happy before quitting this sphere forever.

"Yes, I should be sorry to see you married to Minna, but promise me to make her your wife when you see me no more,

Heaven intends you for each other. . . . I torture you, and you come to this wild country to find rest—you who are racked by the fierce throes of misunderstood genius, worn out by the patient labors of science, who have almost stained your hands by crime and worn the chains of human justice."

Wilfrid fell to the floor in agony. Seraphita breathed on his brow, and he fell asleep. Laying her hand on his brow, she explained to him her feelings and mystical love, exhorting him to rise to the rank of those who are in the circle of love and wisdom and who aspire to celestial illumination. She concluded:

"Now gaze at me for a moment, for you will henceforth see me but darkly, as you behold me by the light of the dull sun of the earth."

She gazed at him with her head gently bent on one side, her hair flowing about her in the airy grace which the sublimest painters have attributed to messengers from heaven; and the folds of her dress had the indescribable grace which makes the artist stop to gaze at the exquisite flowing veil of the antique statue of Polyhymnia. When Wilfrid awoke, Seraphita, lying on her bearskin, with calm face and shining eyes, dismissed him with an invitation to come to tea with the Beckers.

Outside he gazed up at the lights in the windows of the castle and asked himself whether he was awake or sleeping. To recover his mental balance, he went to the manse to spend the evening.

Pastor Becker was seated in his large armchair near the stove and in front of a table on which were books, one of which he was reading, and for extra comfort he had his feet in a foot-muff. A beer-jug and a glass were on his right, while on his left stood a smoky lamp. He was of about sixty years, with a noble Rembrandtesque face and head, and as he smoked his long pipe, he occasionally watched the spirals of smoke with a speculative eye while digesting what he was reading. Minna was sitting opposite him, sewing. Her fresh young face, delicately pure in outline, harmonized with the innocence that shone on her white brow and in her bright eyes. Her attitude as she sat forward on her chair leaning slightly toward the light, showed the grace of her figure. She presented the most complete and typical image of woman born to earthly duties, whose eye might pierce the clouds of the sanctuary, while a mind at once humble and charitable kept her on the level of man.

Until the silence was broken by Wilfrid, the only sound was the heavy step of the kitchen-maid and the sizzle of the dried fish in the frying-pan in the next room.

Wilfrid asked the Pastor for information about the strange being who dwelt at the Castle. He had been six months in the village, and he found that the chains that were binding him were likely to make his stay permanent. On the very first day he fell under Seraphita's enchantment. The Pastor asked, "Are enchantments possible?" and Wilfrid replied that the man who at that moment was so conscientiously studying Jean Wier's Incantations would understand his own sensations. After describing Seraphita's mysterious influence over him, he concluded: "I have for the past few days been wandering round this abyss of madness too helplessly to keep silence any longer. I have, therefore, seized a moment when I find courage enough to resist the monster that drags me to her presence without asking whether I have strength enough to keep up with his flight. Who is she? Did you know her as a child? Was she ever born? Had she parents? Was she conceived by the union of sun and ice? She freezes and she burns; she comes forth, and then vanishes like some coy truth; she attracts and repels one; she alternately kills and vivifies me; I love her, and I hate her! I cannot live thus. I must be either in heaven altogether, or in hell."

The Pastor listened with a mysterious expression, glancing occasionally at his daughter, who seemed to understand Wilfrid's words.

"My dear guest," he said, "to explain her birth it will be necessary to disentangle the obscurest of all Christian creeds," and he proceeded to give a detailed description of Swedenborg's life, writings, beliefs, and teachings.

Swedenborg was especially attached to Baron Seraphitus, his most zealous disciple, who was in search of a woman with the angelic spirit, and Swedenborg revealed her in a vision, saying the life of heaven shone brightly in her and she had gone through the first tests. She was the daughter of a London shoemaker. After the prophet was translated, the Baron came here to Jarvis to solemnize his heavenly nuptials in the practise of prayer. The earthly life of the couple was undoubtedly that of the saints whose virtues are the glory of the Roman Church. They were extremely charitable; they were never angry or impatient, but invariably gentle and beneficent, full of amiability, graciousness, and true kindness. Their marriage was the harmony of two souls in constant union. The wife was simple in manner, sweetly dignified, and lovely in face and form.

In 1783 Seraphita was born. Previously her parents had lived in the greatest retirement in perpetual prayer. They hoped to see Swedenborg. At Seraphita's birth Swedenborg appeared and filled the room with light. He said: "The work is accomplished; the heavens rejoice." The servants heard strange sounds of music, brought, they declared, by the four winds. Swedenborg led the Baron out to the fiord and left him in ecstasy.

"I met him on my way to the Castle. His face was radiant, and his whole appearance inspired. He said: `Your ministrations are superfluous; our child is to be nameless on earth. You will not baptize with earthly waters one who has been bathed in fires from heaven. This child will always be a flower; you will not see it grow old ; you will see it pass away. You have existence, it has life; you have external senses, it has not; it is wholly inward.'

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COUSIN BETTE

In Balzac's La Comedie Humaine we see the beginnings of history treated as a serious novelistic subject, a subject that would dominate much of 19th-century literature and find masterful expression in Tolstoy's War and Peace. Knowledge of historical context is crucial to an understanding of Balzac's thematic concerns as an artist, as well as to a basic understanding of his characters' motives and fortunes. The Napoleonic Wars, Restoration, and 1830 Revolution, all events experienced by the young Balzac, were defining moments in the nation's history and were readily invoked by intellectuals to explain the circumstances, national or domestic, of Balzac's time.

After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, France restored the Bourbon regime under Louis XVIII and Charles X. The Restoration had managed to absorb the republican changes of the Revolution and Napoleon, but, when in 1829, King Charles X revoked the charter which guaranteed a free press among other things, the people, led by the middle class, staged a successful revolution. Charles abdicated, and, under the new King Louis-Philippe a constitutional monarchy was established which had to answer to the Chamber of Deputies, an institution equivalent to the British House of Commons. Composed mainly of wealthy middle class entrepreneurs, the Chamber of Deputies moved rapidly to divide the large family estates that dominated the nation's feudal past and to base France's economy on the principles of finance. This was the political and economic system under which Balzac labored as an artist, and one in which he saw the seeds of destruction for the glories of Napoleonic and dynastic France.

Much of this history can be deduced from the details of Cousin Bette, and we can gather Balzac's attitude about these historical changes in the novel's nostalgic and apprehensive tone. Balzac, whose father was a supplier to Napoleon's army, laments the Empire's military defeat, but, more significantly, he mourns what he felt to be the loss of the noble values of its past. He believed France had become a nation of shopkeepers upholding the morality of self-interest and survival. The heroic past is remembered in as a period of conjugal, social, and professional harmony. Baroness Adeline Hulot recalls that her husband's infidelities began with the dissolution of the empire; and her daughter Hortense is said to be the product of "true love." Throughout the novel, the narrator, along with Hulot and other personages of the old guard, lament the changing times, the loss of the great hereditary estates, and, with them, the proper patrons of art. "Every-thing bears the stamp of personal interest," in a nation where the men are judged by the shrewdness of their speech not the bravery of their deeds; they are but "walking coffins containing the Frenchmen of former France." At the novel's conclusion, Dr. Bianchon offers diagnoses not only of the ailing Baroness and Bette, but of the state itself. "Lack of religion and the encroachment of everything of finance" is to blame for all the social evils. "Noble disinterestedness, and talent, and service to the state, were thought worthy of esteem; but nowadays the law makes money the measure of everything."

While Cousin Bette is an astute, and, at times, propagandistic, analysis of French social history, the novel is also a compelling portrayal of human, ahistorical passions, particularly of desire and vengeance. Hulot is the consummate slave to Eros, responsible for all the woe his family and comrades endure. Humiliated professionally and socially, he persists like some abstract figure of desire, taking on pseudonyms (all anagrams of his real name), attaching himself to one then another teenage mistress in ever more squalid corners of the city, reduced to nothing but his desire. Hulot is certainly repulsive as a human being, but there is something magnificent about his undeviating devotion to a single passion: sexual passion untarnished and undeterred by sentiment, by social life, by anything outside itself. In Bette, Balzac has added another masterful portrait to his gallery of human souls tyrannized by singular passions. Lisbeth Fischer, whose physical and moral ugliness is the antithesis to the saintly grace and beauty of her cousin Adeline, concentrates all her talents and energies onto the secret vengeance of the Hulot family. As she succeeds with her intricate machinations, the discrepancy between her humble status (despite her kinship to the Hulot family, she is referred to, like a servant, by her nickname "Bette") and the actual power she wields becomes almost grotesque. While there is something formulaic about this character driven by revenge, Balzac spends ample time on the causes of her hatred and jealousy; and in discussing her childhood, he anticipates Freud's theories on early trauma and unresolved emotions, and the manifestation of these traumas as adult neuroses.

Despite Balzac's overt aims of discrediting the administration of King Louis-Philippe and the Chamber of Deputies in favor of a centralized monarchy and reinvigorated national church, Cousin Bette, in its series of well-drawn portraits, never fails to honor the infinite complexity of the human soul regardless of historical context. Balzac's fidelity to the truth of his own manifold experience of life, fortunately, prevents him from furnishing simple political solutions to the crises of his time, and enables him to write with the moral courage and earnestness found only in his century's finest works of literature.

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Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées

Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées (Letters of Two Brides) is an epistolary novel by the French writer Honoré de Balzac. It was serialized in the French journal La Presse in 1841 and published by Furne in 1842 as the first work in the second volume (Scènes de la vie privée, tome II or Scenes from Private Life, Volume 2) of Balzac's La Comédie humaine.[1] It was dedicated to the French novelist George Sand. The first English translation of the novel appeared in 1902, with a preface by Henry James.

Letters of Two Brides grew out of two earlier works which Balzac never completed: Mémoires d'une jeune femme (Memoirs of A Young Woman), which was written in 1834,[2] and Sœur Marie des Anges (Sister Marie des Anges), which was probably written around 1835[3]. In 1840, Balzac informed his future wife Ewelina Hańska of his intention to write an epistolary novel: "I am writing an epistolary novel, though I do not know what title to give it, as Soeur Marie des Anges is too long, and that would only apply to the first part."[4] In June 1841, Balzac wrote again to Mme Hanska: "I have just finished Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées".[5] The manuscript to which this letter refers is no longer extant.

On 10 November 1841, Balzac's editor Hippolyte Souverain authorized the serialization of the novel in the French journal La Presse. The editor of the journal, however, bowdlerized Balzac's text. Between 26 November and 6 December 1841 letters I through XXV, which comprised part one of the novel, were serialized. Part two (letters XXVI through XLVII) and part three (letters XLVIII through LIX) were serialized between then and 1 January 1842. The serialization had neither a foreword nor a dedication.

The first Furne edition, which faithfully reproduced Balzac's original text, appeared in two volumes in January 1842. This edition included a foreword (dated "Les Jardies, May 1840"[6]) and a dedication to George Sand. The original division of the novel into three parts was retained.

The second edition appeared on 3 September 1842 as part of Furne's publication of La Comédie humaine. Letters of Two Brides was the first book in the second volume of the series, Scènes de la vie privée(Scenes from Private Life), followed by A Daughter of Eve. For this edition Balzac removed the foreword and divided the novel into two parts. He also altered the date of the foreword to "Paris, 1841".

There exists a final revision of the text in Balzac's own hand in the Lovenjoul Collection.[7] In this revision Canalis replaces M. de Saint-Héreen, and the dates of letters XLVIII, XLIX and LI have been altered.

The fragmentary Sœur Marie des Anges was to form part of the series of works known as Scènes de la vie parisienne (Scenes from Parisian Life). However, this fragment has little in common with Letters of Two Brides; it is not in epistolary form and its plot is quite different. Its relation to the later novel has still not been satisfactorily explained.[8] A character called Mère Marie des Anges, the superior of the Ursuline convent at Arcis-sur-Aube, appears in another of Balzac's novels, The Member for Arcis, as do a number of characters from Letters of Two Brides.

The story concerns two young French women, Louise de Chaulieu (1805-1835) and Renée de Maucombe (born 1807), who become close friends during their novitiate at the Carmelite convent of Blois. When they leave the convent, however, their lives follow two very different paths. Louise chooses a life of romance, whereas Renée takes a much more pragmatic approach; but their friendship is preserved through their correspondence, which continues for a dozen years from 1823 through 1835.

Louise is expected to sacrifice herself for her two brothers and take the veil, but the young girl refuses to submit to such a fate. Her dying grandmother intercedes on her behalf and bequeaths her her fortune, thereby rescuing her from the enclosed life of a Carmelite nun and leaving her financially independent. Free to assist her brothers financially without having to sacrifice her own ambitions, Louise settles in Paris and throws herself into a life of Italian operas, masqued balls and romantic intrigues. She falls in love with an unbecoming but noble Spaniard, Felipe Hénarez, Baron de Macumer. Banished from Spain, he lives incognito in Paris where he is forced to support himself by teaching Spanish. When he regains his fortune and noble standing, he woos Louise with a romantic fervour that finally wins her over. The pair are married in March 1825. They live a life of carefree happiness, but Louise's jealousy embitters him and leads to his physical break-down. He dies in 1829, leaving a grieving widow of twenty-four.

Renée de Maucombe's attitude to love and life are in marked contrast to those of Louise. When she leaves the convent at Blois Renée moves to Provence, where she marries an older man of little wealth or standing whom she can hardly be said to love. She bears Louis de L'Estorade three children, and over the course of the next decade she devotes herself body and soul to the happiness of her family. Gradually she grows to love her husband in her own way, and with her encouragement he makes a career for himself in local politics, which culminates in his becoming a peer of France and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour. During this time Renée is quite scathing in her criticisms of Louise, whom she sees as a selfish and self-indulgent coquette. True happiness for a woman lies in motherhood and devotion to her family.

Meanwhile, four years after the death of Felipe, Louise falls in love again. This time the object of her love is a poor poet and playwright Marie Gaston, who is several years younger than she is. As though taking a leaf out of Renée's book, Louise sells her Parisian property, moves to a chalet in Ville d'Avray (a small village near Paris) and lives a life of seclusion with her new husband. But Renée is not fooled by this masquerade. Louise, she warns, is still living a life devoted to selfishness and self-indulgence, while true happiness lies only in self-sacrifice to one's husband and children - Louise remains childless.

After a few years of apparent bliss, Louise detects a change in her husband. He beomes solicitous about the financial success of his plays, and a large sum of money goes missing. Suspecting him of having an expensive mistress, Louise makes enquiries and comes to the shocking conclusion that he has another family in Paris – an Englishwoman known by the name Madame Gaston, and two children, who look remarkably like Marie. Louise confides her feelings of despair to Renée and announces her determination to commit suicide rather than to submit to such a fate. Renée's husband makes enquiries and discovers the truth of the situation. Madame Gaston is the widow of Marie's brother. The death of her husband has left her financially destitute and Marie has taken it upon himself to assist her and his two nephews, but he is ashamed to ask his wife for money. Reneée writes to Louise to inform her of the truth and rushes to the chalet, but she is too late. Louise has contracted consumption by lying out in the dew overnight and she dies a few days later.

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Un début dans la vie

Un début dans la vie (A Start in Life) is a novel by the French writer Honoré de Balzac. It is the sixth of the Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes of Private Life) in La Comédie humaine.

The novel was serialized in the review La Législature in 1842 under the title Le Danger des mystifications (The Dangers of Gasconade). In 1845 it appeared under its present title in the second Furne edition of La Comédie humaine. Un début dans la vie was the fifth work in Volume 4, or the twenty-fifth of the Scènes de la vie privée.

Balzac wrote Un début dans la vie during one of his many visits to the commune of L'Isle-Adam in Val-d'Oise, a few kilometres north of Paris. The novel is based on a short-story by Balzac's sister Laure Surville, which was later published in 1854 under the title Le Voyage en coucou (The Journey in a Rickety Carriage). Balzac recast the story, transforming it into a profound study of human vanity and its consequences. The novel is dedicated to Laure with the words:

Let the brilliant mind that gave me the subject of this Scene have the honor of it.

In 1841 Balzac drafted the first version of the story with a view to publication in the journal Le Musée des familles. First entitled Les Jeunes gens (Young People) and then Le Voyage en coucou, the work was not to exceed 3,000 lines. The editor Piquée, however, declined to publish it.

The following year Balzac redrafted the story, expanding it to fourteen chapters, and it was serialized in La Législature from 26 July to 6 September under the title Le Danger des mystifications. Three pirated Belgian editions of the work also appeared this year under the same title.

In June 1844 the novel was published under its present title by Dumont. Largely unchanged from its serialization, the work appeared in a two-volume quarto edition, the second volume containing Balzac's La Fausse Maîtresse (The Imaginary Mistress).

In 1845 Un début dans la vie was published in Volume 4 of Furne's second edition of La Comédie humaine. In this version of the work Balzac greatly expanded Mistigris' arsenal of burlesque proverbs. (Three further proverbs were added to the corrected Furne edition.)

Much of the action of this short novel takes place in the rickety old stage-coach — or coucou — of Pierrotin, which regularly carries passengers and goods between Paris and Val-d'Oise. On one such trip from Paris, Comte Hugret de Sérizy, a senator and wealthy aristocrat, is travelling incognito in order to investigate reports that Monsieur Moreau, the steward of his country estate at Presles, is being less than honest in his dealings on the count's behalf with a neighbouring landowner Margueron, a piece of whose land the count wishes to buy.

Among the count's fellow passengers is Oscar Husson, a young good-for-nothing mummy's boy, who is being sent to a friend of his mother's Monsieur Moreau in the hope that a position can be found for him. Also travelling to L'Isle-Adam is Georges Marest, the second clerk of the count's Parisian notary Crottat; Joseph Bridau, a young artist, who is accompanied by his young colleague Léon Didas y Lora, nicknamed Mistigris. The final occupant of the coach is Père Léger, a rich farmer from Val-d'Oise who is leasing the land which the count wishes to buy from Margueron. Léger is hoping to buy it himself and then sell it piecemeal at a significant profit to the count.

To pass the time Georges amuses himself by pretending to be Colonel Czerni-Georges, a young nobleman with a distinguished military career behind him; his fellow travellers are impressed, but the count sees through him and realizes his true identity. Not to be outdone by Marest, the young painter then passes himself off as the celebrated artist Heinrich Schinner. Things become interesting when Oscar joins in and pretends to be a close acquaintance of the Comte de Sérizy and his son. In the course of his boasting, he divulges several private and embarrassing details about the count - details which he could only have learnt from his godparents the Moreaus.

On the journey the count also overhears a conversation in which Léger describes how he and Moreau are conspiring to buy the land the count wants from under his nose and sell it to him at an inflated price.

When the count arrives at Presles he wastes little time dismissing Moreau - not so much for conspiring with Léger as for revealing personal details about the count and his wife to his godson. Oscar is forced to return to Paris and seek a living by some other means.

In time Oscar obtains a license and becomes a clerk in the law office of Desroches in Paris, where he is trained by Godeschal. During this time he renews his acquaintance with Georges Marest, who is actually related to him. For some time Oscar defies everyone's expectations and applies himself diligently to both his studies and his clerkly duties. But Oscar spoils everything by another indiscretion, this one much more serious than the first. At the house of demimondaine Florentine Cabirolle, who was then maintained by Oscar's wealthy uncle Cardot, Oscar gambles away five hundred francs he was given to transact an important legal matter. His hopes ruined for a second time, Oscar is forced to abandon law and enter military service.

Once again, he surprises everybody and becomes a successful soldier. He joins the cavalry regiment of the Duc de Maufrigneuse and the Vicomte de Sérizy, son of the Comte de Sérizy - the same young nobleman Oscar claimed to be acquainted with in the coach on the road to L'Isle-Adam. The interest of the dauphiness and of Abbé Gaudron obtain for him promotion and a decoration. He becomes in turn aide-de-camp to La Fayette, captain, officer of the Legion of Honor and lieutenant-colonel. A noteworthy deed made him famous on Algerian territory during the affair of La Macta; Husson lost his left arm rescuing the mortally wounded Vicomte de Sérizy from the battlefield. Although the vicomte dies shortly afterwards, the Comte de Sérizy is grateful and forgives Oscar for his earlier indiscretion.

Put on half-pay, Oscar obtains the post of collector for Beaumont-sur-Oise.

At the end of the novel, Oscar and his mother are taking the Pierrotin coach to L'Isle-Adam, en route to Beaumont-sur-Oise, and find themselves in the company of several witnesses or accomplices of Oscar's earlier indiscretions: Georges Marest has lost by debauchery a fortune worth thirty thousand francs a year, and is now a poor insurance-broker; Père Léger is now married to the daughter of the new steward of Presles Reybert; Joseph Bridau is now a celebrated artist and married to Léger's daughter; Moreau, whose daughter is riding in another part of the same coach, has risen to high political office.

When Georges begins to blab about the Moreaus, Oscar - who is now the one travelling incognito - rebukes him, reminding him of the dangers of not holding one's tongue in a public conveyance. Georges recognizes him and renews his acquaintance.

In 1838 Oscar becomes engaged to Georgette Pierrotin, daughter of the same Pierrotin who now owns the business that runs the stage-coaches between Paris and Val-d'Oise. At the close of the novel, Balzac draws the following moral:

The adventure of the journey to Presles was a lesson to Oscar Husson in discretion; his disaster at Florentine's card-party strengthened him in honesty and uprightness; the hardships of his military career taught him to understand the social hierarchy and to yield obedience to his lot. Becoming wise and capable, he was happy. The Comte de Sérizy, before his death, obtained for him the collectorship at Pontoise. The influence of Monsieur Moreau de l'Oise and that of the Comtesse de Sérizy and the Baron de Canalis secured, in after years, a receiver-generalship for Monsieur Husson, in whom the Camusot family now recognize a relation.

Oscar is a commonplace man, gentle, without assumption, modest, and always keeping, like his government, to a middle course. He excites neither envy nor contempt. In short, he is the modern bourgeois.

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