"Balzac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time in getting at the sense of what he read. As a matter of fact, he had only a limited acquaintance with any modern languages except his own. He had picked up some colloquial German, and once when laid up in hospital, had set himself to read Balzac's PERE GORIOT with the aid of a dictionary. Thus he had acquired a fairly extensive if somewhat archaic vocabulary. But Lady Bridget's veiled intimation of Wombo's escape couched in up-to-date and highly idiomatic French which would have been perfectly intelligible ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... was first reduced to writing—or at least put into literary form—by Honore de Balzac, and appeared under the title of "The Napoleon of the People" in the third chapter of Balzac's "Country Doctor." It purports to be the story of Napoleon's life and career as related to a group ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... ripe, more complete, or, I should suppose, in better humour with themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibilities of bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smiling province; a region of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic, rather indolent opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace himself even, to go in search of a pleasure; and it is not difficult to understand the sources of this amiable cynicism. He must have a vague ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... certain little attempts to make Mark Ambient talk about himself I tried to put him on the ground of his own writings, but he slipped through my fingers every time and shifted the saddle to one of his contemporaries. He talked about Balzac and Browning, and what was being done in foreign countries, and about his recent tour in the East, and the extraordinary forms of life that one saw in that part of the world. I perceived that he had reasons for not wishing to descant upon literature, and suffered ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... with these he apparently does not consider himself to be concerned, though he seems to have meditated at this time a sort of small comedie humaine—small, for he must have known that he could not withstand the strain of Balzac's shifts of fourteen hours. We are glad he was able to conquer the temptation to imitate, yet we cannot forego a regret that he did not turn to Violet Scully that was and look into the married ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... are on the verge of murdering your wife or breaking into your neighbour's house. Although you personally are guiltless, there is a good deal of sin still committed in your immediate vicinity.) Said Balzac in La Cousine Bette, 'A crime is in the first instance a defect of reasoning powers.' In the appreciation of this truth, Marcus Aurelius was, as usual, a bit beforehand with Balzac. M. Aurelius said, 'No soul wilfully misses truth.' And Epictetus had come to the same conclusion ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... can be more sans facon, and my tremors (for, do you know, I was quite nervous on the occasion, and charged Robert to keep close to me) were perfectly unjustified by the event. You see it was an untried form of society—like trying a Turkish bath. I expected to see Balzac's duchesses and hommes de lettres on all sides of me, but there was nothing very noticeable, I think, though we found it agreeable enough. We go on Friday evening to a Madame Mohl's, where we are to have some of the 'celebrities,' I believe, for she seems to ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... perhaps the last really great thing that Balzac did—for Le Cousin Pons, which now follows it, was actually written before—and it is beyond all question one of the very greatest of his works. It was written at the highest possible pressure, and (contrary to the author's more usual system) in parts, without even seeing a proof, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... speaking of the French Revolution, when, as Balzac remarked, to be a spy was to be a patriot. Heads are not so cheap in our Anglo-Saxon countries; passions not so fierce and uncontrollable. Compare, with a prominent historian, our Boston Massacre and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... adapted to poetry, that the nation seemed in danger of losing all its earlier traditions. For a hundred years France was given over to profane and light literature. Montaigne, Charyon, Ronsard and de Balzac are some of the names of this period. The death of a cat or dog was made the subject of a poem that was no real poetry. It is due to the women of France—to Madame de Rambouillet and her confreres, and to the literary coteries ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... expressions I have accumulated in the "Symphony in White Major" for the purpose of rendering the idea of snowy whiteness would be insufficient to give an idea of the immaculate coat of my cat, by the side of which the ermine's fur would have looked yellow. I called her Seraphita, after Balzac's Swedenborgian novel. Never did the heroine of that wondrous legend, when ascending with Minna the snow-covered summits of the Falberg, gleam more purely white. Seraphita was of a dreamy and contemplative ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... possession of her estates, thanks to the amnesty proclaimed by the Emperor Francis Joseph, she sought in literary labour a field for the activity of her restless intellect. Balzac points to that great female artist and republican, the Duchess of San-Severins, in Stendhal's "La Chartreuse de Parme," as a portrait of the princess. Whether this be so or not, she was assuredly one of the most conspicuous and original figures of ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... . Robert is a warm admirer of Balzac and has read most of his books, but certainly he does not in a general way appreciate our French people quite with my warmth. He takes too high a standard, I tell him, and won't listen to a story for a story's sake—I can bear, you know, to be amused without a strong pull on my admiration. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... as it was enforced in the most perfunctory manner imaginable, there was always plenty of drink going. Decency there was none. The couples passed below and the hell of the besotted broke loose between decks, where the orgies indulged in would have beggared the pen of a Balzac. [Footnote: Statement ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... constantly assured him that it was due entirely to them. Great Britain assumed that it was to her generous appreciation alone that he was known in either hemisphere. The European main-land was not behind the island in this feeling. "Undoubtedly," wrote Balzac, "Cooper's renown is not due to his countrymen nor to the English: he owes it mainly to the ardent appreciation of France." This sentiment of the novelist's obligation to Great Britain was uppermost in the heart of the reviewer in the "United Service Journal." An uneasy ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... Lovell Beddoes' opinion that "the studies of the dramatist and physician are closely, almost inseparably, allied," is it not true that the analytical faculty so essential to the latter is rarely found in connection with great creative ability? Sainte-Beuve never forgave Balzac for saying that critics were unsuccessful authors, but he should have consoled himself with the of the jesters, but many of them very beautiful; and there are three more in The Brides' Tragedy. Since the days of Elizabeth we have had nothing to compare with them. They ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... this study of Balzac's intimate relations with various women, the author regrets her inability, owing to war conditions, to consult a few books which are out of print and certain documents which have not appeared at all in print, notably the collection of the late ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... supposes to be an angel of purity, but whom Madame de Pommeraye triumphantly reveals to him on the morning after his marriage as a creature whose past history has been one of notorious depravity. This disagreeable story, of which Balzac would have made a masterpiece, is told in an interesting way, and the humoristic machinery by which the narrative is managed is less tiresome than usual. It is at least a story with meaning, purpose, and character. It ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... that never would have attained their present form without the intervention of type. It is well known that Carlyle rewrote his books in proof, so that the printer, instead of attempting to correct his galleys, reset them outright. Balzac went a step further, and largely wrote his novels in proof, if such an expression may be allowed. He so altered and expanded them that what went to the printing office as copy for a novelette finally came out of it a full-sized ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling or other change of feature.—Hold on! Stop that! Give a young fellow a chance! Are we not whole years short of that interesting period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... sad piece of experience, the result of misplaced confidence in the guidebook. Ours was the faith a simple public pins upon print. Le journal, c'est un jeune homme, as Balzac said, and even the best of guidebooks, as this one really was, may turn out—a cover ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... bold, often called their like from adjoining cafes to partake in some of their plans for restoration of the empire. The Trois Freres Provencaux, well known for its excellent and costly dinners, is mentioned by Balzac, Lord Lytton, and Alfred de Musset in some of their novels. The Cafe du Grand Commun appears in Rousseau's Confessions in connection with the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... agreeable time as the last four months; not a moment of ennui; had become acquainted with a host of remarkable people of all sorts, political characters of all parties, and the litterateurs, such as Victor Hugo, Balzac, &c., the latter of whom, he says, is a very agreeable man. He told me that 'Le Pere Goriot' is a true story, and that since its publication he had become acquainted with some more circumstances which would have ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... familiar with Balzac's 'Country Doctor'? There's a tribute to men like your husband, who devote their lives to the humble folk." He glanced toward the house. "I mustn't keep my colleague waiting, even for the pleasure of a chat ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... travels with more than one dress, and if white suits the morning hour, perhaps sandy yellow with purple spots on it, a black hat, and a volume of Balzac, suit the evening. Thus she was arranged on the terrace when Jacob came in. Very beautiful she looked. With her hands folded she mused, seemed to listen to her husband, seemed to watch the peasants coming down with brushwood on their backs, seemed to notice how the ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... taste, Fitzjames was profoundly interested, even in spite of himself, in some novels constructed on very different principles. In these early articles he falls foul of 'Mdme. de Bovary,'[69] from the point of view of the simple-minded moralist, but he heartily admires Balzac, whom he defends against a similar charge, and in whose records of imaginary criminals—records not so famous in England at that time as they now are—he found an interest almost equal to that of the 'State Trials' and Palmer's case. He could also, I must add, enjoy Dickens's humour as ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... where I met with Balzac, I saw an old lady, the expression of whose countenance attracted my attention. There was something so animated, so cordial in it, and everybody gathered about her. The Countess introduced me to her, and I heard that she was Madame Reybaud, the authoress of Les Epaves, the little story which I had ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... sale, but what not to keep on sale. The writer of the present article has been admonished not to have in stock the writings of many of the great authors—Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, Miss Braddon, George Eliot, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Balzac, Byron, and many others. A letter received about fifteen years ago read ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... a woman of thirty—no,—she is the woman of thirty. Balzac has written some admirable pages on this subject; my memory of them is vague and uncertain, although durable, as all memories of him must be. But that marvellous story, or rather study, has been blunted in my knowledge of this tiny face with ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... as I laid the books on the table for him, he told his comrade who the two authors were, and promised to explain it all to him, and there wasn't a sign of show-off in it either. As for the Child of the Regiment, he wanted a Balzac, and when I showed him where they were, he picked out "Eugenie Grandet," and they both ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... characters are men and women of genteel society—rascals enough, but living in no state of convulsive crimes; and we follow him in his lively, malicious account of their manners, without risk of lighting upon any such horrors as Balzac or Dumas ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... typewritten and unpublished Life of Balzac now in my possession. This contains many notes throwing light on the Burton and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... theatrical exaggeration in the enthusiasm for a land of freedom, just as, never having known or never having had eyes to see the grotesque and tragic creatures existing all around us, he has doubted the reality of some of Balzac's creations. It is to be feared that for such a play as The Melting Pot Mr. Walkley is far from being the [Greek: charieis] of Aristotle. The ideal spectator must have known and felt more of life than Mr. Walkley, who resembles too much the library-fed ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... In Balzac's unique story, "A Passion in the Desert," a question is asked: "How did their friendship end?" The answer is, "Like all great passions—in a misunderstanding. One suspects the other. One is too proud to ask for an explanation and the other too stubborn to offer it." And so it was ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... from Paris of the death of Honore De Balzac, one of the most eminent French writers of the nineteenth century. "Eighteen months ago," says a Paris letter, "already attacked by dropsy, he quitted France to contract a marriage with a Russian lady, to whom he was devotedly attached. To her he ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... pulses. The attempt has succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectation. Romance, if I am not mistaken, is destined shortly to undergo an important change. Modified by the German and French writers—by Hoffman, Tieck, Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, and Paul Lecroix (le Bibliophile Jacob)—the structure commenced in our own land by Horace Walpole, Monk Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Maturin, but left imperfect and inharmonious, requires, now that the rubbish which choked up its approach ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... turned back to the buggy, taking from beneath the seat a parcel wrapped in brown paper. "Mostyn, they have a most wonderful reading- circle here in the mountains. I have quit trying to keep pace with them." He held the parcel toward Dolly. "I heard you say all of you wanted to know something of Balzac's philosophy. I find that he has expressed it in his novels Louis Lambert and Seraphita. The introductions in both these volumes are ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... so religiously saved entire at the expense of quarrel, which cannot but be tedious, troublesome and dangerous! Honor, indeed—but what, to an old stager in the dilettante line, is honor? Old stagers there are who will own to you, like Balzac's Englishman in a case of conflagration, when honor called on all men to take their buckets, "MAIS JE N'AI POINT D'HONNEUR!" To whom, unluckily, you cannot answer as in that case, "C'EST EGAL, 'T is all one; do as if you had some!" ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that operation was entrusted by Fate to the most casual assemblage of irresponsible young men (all, however, older than myself) that, as if drunk with Provencal sunshine, frittered life away in joyous levity on the model of Balzac's "Histoire des Treize" qualified by a dash of romance de cape ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... continued. "Get out your pen, and ink, and paper, and get busy;—eight dime novels of thirty thousand words apiece—two hundred and forty thousand words a day for five days! Shades of Sir Walter Scott and Balzac!" ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... was out of the common. Instead of using an elegant and refined diction, they employed only a pretentious and conceitedly affected style, which became highly ridiculous; instead of improving the national idiom they completely spoilt it. Where formerly D'Urfe, Malherbe, Racan, Balzac, and Voiture reigned, Chapelain, Scudry, Mnage, and the Abb Cotin, "the father of the French Riddle," ruled in their stead. Moreover, every lady in Paris, as well as in the provinces, no matter what ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... cantons there is one cretin to every 25 inhabitants. In Styria, the Tyrol, and along the Rhine cretins are quite common, and not long since cases existed in Derbyshire. These creatures have been allowed to marry and generate, and thus extend their species. In "Le Medicin de Campagne," Balzac has given a vivid picture of the awe and respect in which they were held and the way in which they were allowed to propagate. Speaking of the endemic cretins, Beaupre says: "I see a head of unusual form and size, a squat and bloated figure, a stupid look, bleared, hollow, and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... usually found among those whom society calls 'common or unclean.' These brutish beings are the chosen vessels in whom God has poured the elixirs which amaze humanity. Such beings have furnished the prophets, the St. Peters, the hermits of history." BALZAC, in "Cousin Pons." ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... read them when they're extraordinarily good, and I don't go to plays. I read Balzac for instance—I encounter the admirable portrait of Valerie Marneffe in La ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... which, again, is framed the Nile. Many people have cut their names upon the walls of Philae. Once, as I sat alone there, I felt strongly attracted to look upward to a wall, as if some personality, enshrined within the stone, were watching me, or calling. I looked, and saw written "Balzac." ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... of Spain was added to the fashion of Italy; Platonism, Petrarchism, Marinism, Gongorism, the spirit of romance and the daintinesses of learning and of pedantry met and mingled. Hither came Malherbe, Racan, Chapelain, Vaugelas; at a later time Balzac, Segrais, Voiture, Godeau; and again, towards the mid-years of the century, Saint-Evremond and La Rochefoucauld. Here Corneille read his plays from the Cid to Rodogune; here Bossuet, a marvellous boy, improvised a midnight discourse, and Voiture ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... bon vin meuble mon estomac, Je suis plus savant que Balzac— Plus sage que Pibrac; Mon brass seul faisant l'attaque De la nation Coseaque, La mettroit au sac; De Charon je passerois le lac, En dormant dans son bac; J'irois au fier Eac, Sans que mon coeur fit tic ni tac, Presenter du tabac. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... write a little for publication, the topic has a tendency to become much more personal. My last undergraduate literary discoveries were of France and the Renaissance. Accidentally finding out that I could read French, I naturally betook myself to Balzac. If you read him straight on, without a dictionary, you begin to learn a good many words. The literature of France has been much more popular in England lately, but thirty years agone it was somewhat neglected. There does seem to be something in French poetry which ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... whereupon he measured with his stalwart arm the distance between his body and the Alderman's nose. This being the signal for a grand set to, which was had in right good earnest, the scene of confusion that followed no one need attempt to describe, unless he have the pen of a Balzac. Tumblers and broken chairs being the order of weapon most in use, and the major not being skilled in the use of such arms, lost no time in retreating to a dark closet, where, closely packed among sundry old clothes and ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the case with most of the French novelists of the modern 'Literature of Horror,' and the two literatures are morally identical. We do not know of a complaint which can be justly brought against the School of Balzac and Dumas which will not equally apply to the average tragedy of the whole period preceding ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... scarce on the island. One official gentleman from Lisbon, quite an accomplished man, who spoke French fluently and English tolerably, had some five hundred books, chiefly in the former tongue, including seventy-two volumes of Balzac. His daughter, a young lady of fifteen, more accomplished than most of the belles of the island, showed me her little library of books in French and Portuguese, including three English volumes, an odd ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... I was either in haste, or Virgil gave me no occasion for the ornament of words; for it seldom happens but a monosyllable line turns verse to prose, and even that prose is rugged and unharmonious. Philarchus, I remember, taxes Balzac for placing twenty monosyllables in file without ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... leather chairs on each side of the fireplace, broad tables carrying only the essential lamps and ashtrays, a shabby desk where Richard kept personal papers, and bookshelves crammed with novels. Harriet, making a timid round, saw Balzac and Dickens, Dumas and Fielding, several Shakespeares and a complete Meredith, jostling elbows with modern novels in bright jackets, and yellow French romances losing ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... mythology, and at one side two or three other volumes, which Sommers took up with more interest. One was a book on psychology—a large modern work on the subject. A second was an antiquated popular treatise on "Diseases of the Mind." Another volume was an even greater surprise—Balzac's Une Passion dans la Desert, a well-dirtied copy from the public library. They were fierce condiments ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... place of God we see Law, and the old concept of rewards and punishments has been re-stated as 'the survival of the fittest.' If, on the other hand, you need emotions, and the inspiration of concrete teaching, you must go to Balzac, ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... the doctor was romantic. Though he read Balzac all the year through, he still enjoyed the Waverley Novels as much as when he had first come upon them, in thick leather-bound volumes, in his grandfather's library. He nearly always read Scott on Christmas and holidays, because it brought back the pleasures ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for. The novelist starts out in search of a truth. I will take as an example the character of the "Baron Hulot," in Cousine Bette, by Balzac. The general fact observed by Balzac is the ravages that the amorous temperament of a man makes in his home, in his family, and in society. As soon as he has chosen his subject he starts from known facts, then he makes his experiment and exposes Hulot to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... cast upon an honest woman as she passes, by respectable men, old men. What savage expressions intercepted under the feverish light of the electric lamps! What tension, what spasms of covetousness! What hallucinations of pleasure and of gold! Tragic matter here, but low tragedies a la Balzac, not those acted under an open sky by heroes. A few pistol-shots from time to time, a few poisonings, some drownings: that is all that transpires of the interior evil. The rest passes away in suppressed tears, brooding hatreds, in accepted ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... him—"swellin' wisibly," as Tony Weller puts it. Mr. Coburn has represented him as flowing off the plate in the very act of being photographed and blurring his own outlines in the process. Also he has caught the Chestertonian resemblance to Balzac and unconsciously handled his subject as Rodin handled Balzac. You may call the placing of the head on the plate wrong, the focussing wrong, the exposure wrong if you like, but Chesterton is right and a right impression ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... human beings as any Master has given us. It is not assuredly in George Eliot, as Canon Ainger suggests, that I find an affinity to Crabbe among the moderns, but in two much greater writers of quite different texture, Balzac and Dickens. Had Crabbe not been bounded and restrained by the conventions of his cloth, he might have become one of the most popular story-tellers in our literature—the English Balzac. At a hundred points ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... spent some time in London, seeing all the celebrities of the day there, and then crossed over to Paris. Like London, Paris had then some brilliant men and women, whose peers she has not seen since. Rachel was the queen of the tragic stage, George Sand queen of the literary domain. De Balzac, Eugene Sue, Dumas pere, and Beranger were all alive, and the centre of the Parisian literary coterie. Liszt and Chopin held the musical world in the bondage of sweet sounds. Into this little inner circle Margaret entered, and ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the subtile development of an individual. Sometimes Richter's men and women are only the lay-figures upon which he piles and adjusts his gorgeous cloth-of-gold and figured damask. But Siebenkaes and his wife, in "Flower-, Fruit-, and Thorn-Pieces," are characters, quite as much as any of Balzac's nice genre men and women, and on a higher plane. Richter uses his persons of both sexes principally to express the conditions of his feeling; they are cockles, alternately dry and sparkling, underneath his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... us compare Poe's short-story, "The Cask of Amontillado," with Conan Doyle's "The New Catacomb." In both of these the theme is revenge, brought about by having the one seeking to entomb his enemy alive—the same theme, precisely, as Balzac had used earlier in "La Grande Breteche," and Edith Wharton in later years in "The Duchess at Prayer." In "The Cask of Amontillado," Montresor desires to be revenged upon Fortunato because the latter has both injured and insulted him. Exactly how he has been insulted ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... edition of "Evelyn Innes" (I think the passage has been dropped out of the second) Ulick Dean says that one should be careful what one writes, for what one writes will happen. Well, perhaps what Balzac wrote has happened, and I may have done no more than to realise one of his most ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... the ground floor to the left of the hallway was imposing in a stately Old-World way. The rooms in Wisteria Villa were rooms for personages from Zola; this room was inhabited by ghosts from the pages of Balzac. It was large, high, and square; the walls were hung with a golden scroll design printed on ancient yellow silk; the furniture was of some rich brown finish with streaks and lusters of bronzy yellow, and a glass chandelier, all spangles and teardrops of crystal, hung from a ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... perceive the genius of Pope. The grace and discrimination lavished by Francis Jeffrey over a thousand pages, weigh like a feather beside one sentence about Wordsworth's Excursion, and one tasteless sneer at Charles Lamb. Even the mighty figure of Sainte-Beuve totters at the whisper of the name Balzac. Even Matthew Arnold would have been wiser to have taken counsel with himself before he laughed at Shelley. And the very unimportant but sincere and interesting writer, whose book occupies us to-day, is in some respects the crowning instance of the rule. ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... snowy sunbonnet and striped apron was sitting knitting. It was good to be there lying prone upon the barn straw near the door above the crazy ladder, writing letters. I had learned to love this place and these people whom I seem to know so very well from having read Rene Bazin, Daudet, Maupassant, Balzac and Marie Claire. High up and far away to the west a Zeppelin was to be seen travelling in a westerly direction; the farmer's wife, our landlady, had just rescued a tin of bully beef from one of her all-devouring pigs; at the barn door ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... it Morgan's Ancient Society, with the corners broken, and a fine-print volume of Shakespeare's plays. Then there was a pile of magazines and beyond them a stack of books whose subjects varied from Balzac to strange, scientific-sounding names. At the other end of the shelf, within easy reach from one lying upon the bunk, was a cigar-box full of smoking tobacco, a half-dozen books of cigarette papers, and several blocks ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... 'You don't know Balzac, my friend,' went on the young man in a conversational tone, 'or I would tell you that, like Rastignac, war is declared between ourselves and society; but if you have not the knowledge you have the will, and that is enough for me. ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... France and Marie Touchet, was born on the 28th of April 1573, at the castle of Fayet in Dauphine. His father dying in the following year, commended him to the care and favour of his brother and successor, Henry III., who faithfully fulfilled the charge. His mother married Francois de Balzac, marquis d'Entragues, and one of her daughters, Henriette, marchioness of Verneuil, afterwards became the mistress of Henry IV. Charles of Valois, was carefully educated, and was destined for the order of Malta. At the early age of sixteen ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... Balzac left in manuscript a chapter, which he called "Theorie de la demarche,"[35] in which he says: "The look, the voice, the respiration, and the attitude or walk, are identical. But, as it has not been given to man, the power to stand guard, at once, over these four different simultaneous ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace our epoch will leave across ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... is quite true that he assigns to selfishness and brutal passion a very large part in carrying on the machinery of the world. Some readers may infer that he was unlucky in his experience, and others that he loved facts too unflinchingly. His stories sometimes remind one of Balzac's in the descriptions of selfishness triumphant over virtue. One, for example, of his deeply pathetic poems is called 'The Brothers;' and repeats the old contrast given in Fielding's Tom Jones and Blifil. The shrewd sly hypocrite has received all manner of kindnesses from the generous ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... says he "played the sedulous ape." He studied the masterpieces of literature, and tried to imitate them. He kept at this for several years. At the end he was a master himself. We have reason to believe that the same was true of Thackeray, of Dumas, of Cooper, of Balzac, of Lowell. All these men owe their skill very largely to practice in imitation of other great writers, and often of writers not as great as they themselves. Moreover, no one will accuse any of these writers of ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... Like Descartes and Balzac, he was a native of Touraine, and Tours and Chinon have only done their duty in each of them erecting in recent years a statue to his honour, a twofold homage reflecting credit both on the province and on the town. But the precise facts about his birth are nevertheless ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... nothing in The Melbourne Review brought me 8/15/0 from a good English magazine. I continued to write for this review, until it ceased to exist, in 1885, literary and political articles. The former included a second one on "George Eliot's Life and Work," and one on "Honore de Balzac," which many of my friends thought my ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... you know a novel of Balzac, belonging to the "Celibataires" series, called Pierrette? It is not one of Balzac's masterpieces, but it has points of much interest for us. It is the story of an orphaned Breton girl, a sweet, innocent child, who is suddenly snatched away, by her evil star, from ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the truth of Stendhal's opinion about the vogue of Scott's novels and his place as chief of the romantics, there is no end to the list of witnesses who might be summoned. Perhaps it may be enough to remember how the young Balzac was carried away by the novels as they came fresh from the translator, almost immediately after their first ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker
... dainty pose in it suggestive of inscrutable things behind the word. Elfrida looked at it affectionately, her eyes caressed the lines as she read them. "I find here true things and clever things," she went on; "Yes, and original, quite original things. That about Balzac has never been said before—I assure you, Buddha, it has never been said before! Yet the editor of the Athenian returns it to me in two days with a printed form of thanks—exactly the same printed form of thanks with which he would return a poem by Arabella ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... had exercised the powers of a dictator, who had levied armies and shaken governments, and through whose hands there had passed thousands of millions of francs, sought for a country home. He found for sale a small estate which had once belonged to Balzac, and which is known as Les Jardies. It was in wretched repair; yet the small sum which it cost Gambetta—twelve thousand francs—was practically all that he possessed. Worn and weary as he was, it seemed ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... direction of Mr. Worthington's secret and stolen glances the entire evening. And now towards this point he finally transported himself by gradual movements which he believed appeared unstudied and indifferent. He was confronted by a good deal of French—to him an unfamiliar language. Here a long row of Balzac; then, the Waverley Novels in faded red cloth of very old date. Racine, Moliere, Bulwer following in more modern garb; Shakespeare in a compass that promised very small type. His quick trained glance sweeping ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... discourse confidential? If so, I shall certainly retire, and leave you and mamma to tender communings, and an interchange of souls," said Olga, who reclined on a lounge in her mother's room, and slowly turned the leaves of a volume of Balzac. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... not have any moral value and would thus be automatically excluded from any religion. He, therefore, returned the volume to the Hebrew with the remark that as an adult he found the stories of De Maupassant and Balzac more interesting, even though they belonged to ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the chateaux of the Loire. If it be French history, or the study of modern economic or commercial conditions, the past activities and present prosperity of the city will give much food for thought. If to literature one's mind turns, there is the association with Balzac's birth in the Rue Royale, and his delightful picturings of the city's environment in the "Cure de Tours," "Le Lys dans la Vallee," and "La Grenadiere." Says Balzac of the habitant: "...He is a listless and unobliging individual." But the sojourner for a day will probably not notice ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... Prurient influenza of Platform Benevolence, and "Paradise to All-and-sundry," will come. In the general putrescence of your "religions," as you call them, a strange new religion, named of Universal Love, with Sacraments mainly of—Divorce, with Balzac, Sue and Company for Evangelists, and Madame Sand for Virgin, will come,—and results fast following therefrom which will astonish you ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... supreme imaginative substance as a poem? I think it is, and that it will never be otherwise. But, among novels, why is it that one here and there calls us back to its shelf with almost the insistence of a lyric, while for the most part a story read is a story done with? Balzac is always good to re-read, but not Tolstoi: and I couple two of the giants. To take lesser artists, I would say that we can re-read Lavengro but not Romola. But what seems puzzling is that Hardy, who is above ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... good deal of spirit, some of them considerable feeling, and are generally amusing. Of novel writers there are many, but unfortunately the bad taste prevails of introducing subjects in them that prevent their being read by females, with a few exceptions; those of Balzac are by no means devoid of merit and are exceedingly entertaining, and some there are which any one may peruse of Eugene Sue, who has lately been knighted by the King of the Netherlands; the same may be said, although of the latter ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... (1820) had some influence on the French romantic school and was utilized, in some particulars, by Balzac. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Luynes, d'Andigne de la Chasse, Antony Thouret, Arene, Audren de Kerdrel (Ille-et-Vilaine), Audren de Kerdrel (Morbihan), de Balzac, Barchou de Penhoen, Barillon, O. Barrot, Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, Quentin Bauchard, G. deBeaumont, Bechard, Behaghel, de Belevze, Benoist-d'Azy, de Benardy, Berryer, de Berset, Basse, Betting de Lancastel, Blavoyer, Bocher, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... At that period this famous hotel had its pedantries, but it was severely intellectual. Hither came Mademoiselle de Scuderi; Mademoiselle de Montpensier, granddaughter of Henry IV.; Vaugelas, and others of the poets; also Balzac, Voiture, Racan, the Duc de Montausier, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de la Fayette, and others. The most marked thing about this hotel was the patronage extended to men of letters. Those great French ladies welcomed poets and scholars, and encouraged them, and did not allow them to starve, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... of Poe and the grim realities of Balzac would not serve to describe that chase. The magnificent vitality of that man Haggerty yet fills me with wonder. He borrowed a roadster from Killigrew's garage, and hummed away toward New York. On the way he laid his plans of battle, winnowed the chaff from the grain. ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... it is Balzac tells us,' said Donogan, 'that women and politics are the only two exciting pursuits in life, for you never can tell where either ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... tales abroad, even allowing for the exaggeration of Rumor with her hundred tongues. One thing, however, is clear; that the Presse was a liberal paymaster to its feuilletonistes. To Dumas, Sand, De Balzac, Theophile Gautier, and Jules Sandeau, it four years ago paid 300 francs per day for contributions. The Presse, as M. Texier says, is now less the collective reason of a set of writers laboring to a common intent, than the expression of the individual activity, energy, and wonderful ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... needs a literary interpretation. It needs a literary artist who will portray to the public in the form of fiction the real life of the elementary school,—who will idealize the technique of teaching as Kipling idealized the technique of the marine engineer, as Balzac idealized the technique of the journalist, as Du Maurier and a hundred other novelists have idealized the technique of the artist. We need some one to exploit our shop-talk on the reading public, and to show up our work as you and I know it, not as you and I ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... "You look like Balzac's 'Femme Peinte Par Elle-Meme'," he said, as he fanned her with one hand and held her coffee cup ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... he were turned loose among a bevy of perfectly well-educated women, and meant mischief, I should be disposed to lay longer odds against his chances than I would against those of many men who have never read one word of Balzac, Michelet, or Kant. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... writers are liable to the same reproach. Voiture, Balzac, even Coraeneille, have too much affected those ambitious ornaments, of which the Italians in general, and the least pure of the ancients, supplied them with so many models. And it was not till late, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac's "Louis Lambert" that all the world's great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... alluring prize for a short story, and Tig wrote one, and rewrote it, making alterations, revisions, annotations, and interlineations which would have reflected credit upon Honore; Balzac himself. Then he wrought all together, with splendid brevity and dramatic force,—Tig's own words,—and mailed the same. He was convinced he would get the prize. He was just as much convinced of it as Nora Finnegan would have been if ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... of the component parts, however, are of very high excellence. I do not myself think that Pierrette, which opens the series, is quite the equal of its companions. Written, as it was, for Countess Anna de Hanska, Balzac's step-daughter of the future, while she was still very young, it partakes necessarily of the rather elaborate artificiality of all attempts to suit the young person, of French attempts in particular, and it may perhaps be said of Balzac's attempts most of all. It belongs, in a way, to the Arcis ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... of this; the infinitely little men and women daring to buy and sell "short, snappy stuff" in this somber and terribly beautiful world of Balzac and Wells and Turgenieff. And pathos there was in that wasted year when Walter Babson sought to climb from the gossiping little prairie town to the grandeur of great capitals by learning to be an efficient manufacturer of "good, lively rural poems." He neglected even his college-entrance ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... Balzac's [104] studies had led him over a wide range of thought and speculation, and his shadowing forth of physiological truth in this strange story may have been intentional. At any rate, the matter of life is a veritable peau de chagrin, and for every vital act it is somewhat the smaller. All ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Spiridion, for instance, she describes an ascetic nature as it has never been done in any other work of fiction. Newman himself has not written passages of deeper or purer mysticism, of more sincere spirituality. Balzac, in Seraphita, attempted something of the kind, but the result was never more than a tour de force. He could invent, he could describe, but George Sand felt; and as she felt, she composed, living with and loving with an understanding ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... seems to me more likely to live than Mr. Wells, is Mr. Arnold Bennett. Mr. Bennett's achievement in his three principal books, the Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, and Hilda Lessways, has the solidity and relief—the ugliness also!—of Balzac, or of Stendhal; a detachment, moreover, and a coolness, which Mr. Wells lacks. These qualities may well preserve them, if "those to come" find their subject-matter sufficiently interesting. But the Comedie Humaine has a breadth and magnificence of general conception ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but they will take a transcript from life and end when they get through, without informing the reader what becomes of the characters. And they will try to interest this reader in "poor real life" with its "foolish face." Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George Eliot, Turgenieff, and Anthony {585} Trollope, and they regard novels as studies in sociology, honest reports of the writer's impressions, which may not be without a certain scientific ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... most important acts of the great Venetian Republic have been discussed and decided upon; and that in this Palace besides Doges and Senators, Kings and Ambassadors, Alfred de Musset (then a fair and charming young man in delicate health) took up his abode, in 1833, and Balzac, mme George Sand (who here wrote her novel Leone Leoni), and Victor Feuillet, who, for his magnificent romance L'Honntet, drew his inspiration ...
— A Summary History of the Palazzo Dandolo • Anonymous
... is Balzac. In reading him for pleasure, as you read Dickens and Thackeray, you are absorbing an exact and fruitful knowledge of French society of the Restoration and of Louis Philippe. Moreover you are still ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... right that all things exist only in the imagination; has a passion for such "abracadabrante follies" that seem so learned and logical, but is grieved to feel them to be false; longs to penetrate the intellectual world, to see, learn, and know everything; admires Balzac because he describes so frankly all that he has felt; loves Fleury, who has shown her a wider horizon; still has spells of admiring her dazzling complexion and deploring that she can not go out alone; feels ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... "problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may nominally write about, the result is, above all else, an exposure of the writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... Dieu! I tell you that he could not drink, and once Balzac told us a piquant story and Frederic fainted. I remember well how Balzac stared and said in that great voice of his: 'Guard well thy little damsel, my good Minkiewicz, else he may yet be abducted by a tom-cat,' and then he laughed ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... Balzac was one of that powerful generation of writers of the nineteenth century who came after Napoleon, as the illustrious Pleiad of the seventeenth century came after Richelieu,—as if in the development of civilization there were ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... all of these things to the schoolmistress, or not,—whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon,—whether I cribbed them from Balzac,—whether I dipped them from the ocean of Tupperian wisdom,—or whether I have just found them in my head, laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I cannot say. Wise men have said more foolish things,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... his listeners. But of all the illustrations yet invented, the general verdict has hitherto declared in favour of those supplied to Theophile Gautier's French edition of 1862 by Gustave Dore, who fully maintained by them the reputation he had gained for work of a similar genre in his drawings for Balzac's Contes Drolatiques. When, however, the public has had an opportunity of appreciating the admirably fantastic drawings made by Mr. William Strang and Mr. J. B. Clark for the present edition, they will probably admit that Baron Munchausen's indebtedness to his illustrations, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... Guynemer must reappear—if a prisoner he must escape, if dead he must come to life. His father said he would go on believing even to the extreme limits of improbability. The journalist who signs his letters from the front to Le Temps with the pseudonym d'Entraygues recalled a passage from Balzac in which some peasants at work on a haystack call to the postman on the road: "What's the news?" "Nothing, no news. Oh! I beg your pardon, people say that Napoleon has died at St. Helena." Work stops at once, and the peasants look at one another in silence. ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... Frenchwoman of distinction,—nor were the worldly wits of fashion her vain and supercilious satellites. But De Lamennais climbed to her mansarde, and unfolded therein his theories of saintly and visionary philosophy. Liszt and Chopin bound her in the enchantment of their wonderful melodies. De Balzac feasted her in his fantastic lodgings, and lighted her across the square with a silver-gilt flambeau, himself attired in a flounced satin dressing-gown, of which he was extremely proud. Pierre Leroux instructed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... are among the most characteristic and original of the author's works. And wherever we notice this quality in a story, we call it Hawthornish. "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," is Hawthornish; so is "Peter Schemil, the Man without a Shadow"; or Balzac's "Peau de Chagrin"; or later work, some of it manifestly inspired by Hawthorne, like Stevenson's tale of a double personality, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; or Edward Bellamy's "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process"—a process for ensuring forgetfulness of unpleasant things—a ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers |
