Balzac

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Saltus Edgar. Balzac

CHAPTER I. THE VAGARIES OF GENIUS

CHAPTER II. THE COMÉDIE HUMAINE

CHAPTER III. THE BUSKIN AND THE SOCK

CHAPTER IV. THE CHASE FOR GOLD

CHAPTER V. THE THINKER

CHAPTER VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Отрывок из книги

“One would say he had read the inscription on the gates of Busyrane, – ‘Be bold;’ and on the second gate, – ‘Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold;’ and then again had paused well at the third gate, – ‘Be not too bold.’” – Emerson, Plato.

The general plan and outline of the “Comédie Humaine” originated in a comparison between humanity and animal existence. That which Buffon had achieved in zoölogy, Balzac proposed to accomplish in moral science, and the habits and customs as well as the vices and virtues of his contemporaries found in him a secretary whose inventory offers to posterity an elaborate insight into the every-day life of France in the nineteenth century, and realizes for their future curiosity that work which the ancient monarchies have neglected to bequeath to us as their own civilizations.

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In the “Scènes de la Vie Privée,” life is represented between the last developments of childhood and the first calculations of virility. These scenes contain tableaux of the emotions and undefined sensations combined with pictures of the errors committed through ignorance of the exigencies of the world.

The “Scènes de la Vie de Province” represents that phase of existence in which passions, calculations, and ideas take the place of sensations, impulses, and illusions. The instincts of the young man of twenty are generous; at thirty he calculates and turns egotist. These scenes therefore initiate the reader into the thousand aspects of the transition through which a man passes when abandoning the thoughtless impulses of adolescence for the politic attitudes of manhood. Life becomes serious: positive interests jostle with violent passions, disillusions begin, the social machinery is revealed, and from the shock of moral or pecuniary interests the crime bursts in the midst of the most tranquil household.

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