"Balzac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to create even, characters and types of eternal verity. They profess for Mark Twain the same sort of vehement admiration that we have in France for Balzac." ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... him; that she mourns at his misfortunes, promises him long before hand to the world; and when the world, by its sins, is unworthy to possess him longer, heaven, which calls him home, hangs out new lights, etc. With this hyperbole M. Balzac regaled Cardinal Richelieu, adding, that to form such a minister, universal nature was on the stretch; God gives him first by promise, and makes him the expectation of ages. For this he was attacked by the critics, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... See Balzac, in his lonely garret, toiling, toiling, waiting, waiting, amid poverty and hunger, but neither hunger, debt, poverty nor discouragement could induce him to swerve a hair's breadth from his purpose. He could wait, even while a ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... 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 ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... might be collected from his works of samples of these attacks on women. He has manifestly made a careful study of their ways, with which he now and then betrays that curiously intimate acquaintance to which we are accustomed in a Richardson or a Balzac. How accurate are such incidental remarks as this, that women are "full measurable" in such matters as sleep—not caring for so much of it at a time as men do! How wonderfully natural is the description of Cressid's ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... sojourn of Henry James in 1905 shattered all records and established a new orientation for our people. It was Sally Owen who said, when certain citizens declared that Mr. James was inaudible, that many heard him perfectly that night in the Propylaeum who had always thought Balzac the ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... 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 ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... "As to the letters," he continued, glancing over them, "they are very commonplace. Absolutely no clue in them to Mr. Angel, save that he quotes Balzac once. There is one remarkable point, however, which will ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... madman, at my stories, and can make nothing of them; my simplicity is tame and dull—my passion tinsel, boyish, hysterical. Never mind—ten years hence, if I live, I shall have learned, so help me God. I know one must work, in the meantime (so says Balzac) comme le mineur ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... did Anthony try to open his mind to the romance of finance; he could think of Mr. Ellinger only as one of the buyers of the handsome leather sets of Thackeray, Balzac, Hugo, and Gibbon that lined the walls of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... a striking group of Frenchmen who passed on this torch of ethical and aesthetic rebellion. Some of them are wildly romantic like Dumas and Hugo; some of them perversely realistic like Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier, Zola. Paul Verlaine, a near contemporary of ours, is of this first number; writer of some of the most exquisite lyrics in the French language, yet a man who floated all his life in typical romantic fashion from passion to repentance, "passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... or very recent. What we old stagers esteemed as classical in fiction and BELLES-LETTRES are sealed books to the present generation. It is an exception, for instance, to meet with a young man or young woman who has read Walter Scott. Perhaps Balzac's reason is the true one. Scott, says he, 'est sans passion; il l'ignore, ou peut-etre lui etait-elle interdite par les moeurs hypocrites de son pays. Pour lui la femme est le devoir incarne. A de rares exceptions pres, ses heroines sont absolument les memes ... La femme porte le desordre ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... is a sorrowful remedy according to my notions. It is horrible to require so much sleep! How can any one who is a seven-sleeper become great? 'Les hommes puissans veillent et veulent,' says Balzac with reason; and because my miserable heavy nature requires so much sleep, so certainly shall I never turn out great in any way. Besides, this entrancement, this glorification produces such wakeful moments in the soul, that one feels poor and stripped when they ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... In De Balzac's story of Father Goriot, a grocer makes a large fortune, of which he spends on himself as much as may keep him alive; and on his two daughters, all that can promote their pleasures or their pride. He marries them to men of rank, supplies their secret expenses, and provides for his favorite ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... very wonderful book. If only messieurs les romanciers could photograph experience in their fiction as she has done in some of her pages! The episode of Pachay, short as that is, is masterly—above the reach of Balzac; how far above the laborious, beetle—flight of Henry James! Above even George Meredith. It is what James would give his right hand to do once. The episode of Antonelli is very good, too, but not so ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... destined to become famous in the sequel as the Bastard of Orleans, or the brave Dunois. "You were stolen from me," she said; "it is you who are fit to avenge your father." These are not the words of ordinary mourning, or of an ordinary woman. It is a saying over which Balzac would have rubbed his episcopal hands. That the child who was to avenge her husband had not been born out of her body was a thing intolerable to Valentina of Milan; and the expression of this singular and tragic jealousy is preserved to us by a rare chance, in such straightforward ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Wanderer" (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
... required more time to defend a tragedy by a great collection of authorities, than to write it; and I am supposing the same number of pages in the tragedy and in the defence. Heinsius perhaps bestowed more time in defending his Herodes infanticida against Balzac, than a Spanish (or a Scotch) metaphysician bestows on a large volume of controversy, where he takes all from his own stock." I am somewhat concerned in the truth of this principle. There are articles in the present work occupying but a few pages, which could never have been produced ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... forth in music and in architecture becomes apparent. Music is interior, abstract, subjective, speaking directly to the soul in a simple and universal language whose meaning is made personal and particular in the breast of each listener: "Music alone of all the arts," says Balzac, "has power to make us live within ourselves." A work of architecture is the exact opposite of this: existing principally and primarily for the uses of the body, it is like the body a concrete organism, attaining to esthetic expression only in the reconciliation and fulfilment ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... of Count Demidoff and of Major Frazer, the obstreperous fooleries of Lord Henry Seymour, the studied extravagances of Comte d'Alton-Shee, created in the public mind the impression that the club was nothing less than a sort of infernal pit, peopled by wicked dandies like Balzac's De Marsay, Maxime de Trailles, Rastignac, etc. Even the box of the club at the opera was dubbed with the uncanny nickname loge infernale, and the talk of the town ran upon the frightful sums lost and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... summer of 1894 with my son Gerrit, in his home at Thomaston, Long Island. Balzac's novels, and the "Life of Thomas Paine" by Moncure D. Conway, with the monthly magazines and daily papers, were my mental pabulum. My daughter, Mrs. Stanton Lawrence, returned from England in September, 1894, having had a pleasant visit with her sister in Basingstoke. In December ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... as different as possible from Mr. Allen's was Edgar Saltus, just dead, who stood alone and decadent in a country which the fin de siecle scarcely touched with its graceful, graceless maladies. He began his career, after a penetrating study of Balzac, with The Philosophy of Disenchantment and The Anatomy of Negation, erudite, witty challenges to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current French philosophers and poets. Erudition, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... long, than thy monument was thy memory. Thou hast not encountered, Master, in the Paradise of Poets, Messieurs Malherbe, De Balzac, and Boileau— Boileau who spoke of thee as Ce poete orgueilleux trebuche ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... Surgeon. It was Dr. Church who first gave me an idea of Bucky O'Neill's versatility, for I happened to overhear them discussing Aryan word-roots together, and then sliding off into a review of the novels of Balzac, and a discussion as to how far Balzac could be said to be the founder of the modern realistic school of fiction. Church had led almost as varied a life as Bucky himself, his career including incidents as far apart as exploring and elk-hunting in the Olympic Mountains, cooking in a lumber-camp, ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... 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 ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... large volumes on Leonardo da Vinci. Raising his eyes, the parson read through the titles: Browning's works; Tennyson in a cheap seven-and-six edition; Swinburne, Pater, Rossetti, Morris, two novels by Rhoda Broughton, Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, and Smollett; the complete works of Balzac, Gautier's Emaux et Camees, Salammbo, L'Assommoir; Carlyle, Newman, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... serving as Preface to The Life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, reveals something of its author's erudition. Among the critics, he was familiar with Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Dionysius of Halicarnasseus, Heinsius, Bochart, Balzac, Rapin, Le Bossu, and Boileau. But this barely hints at the extent of his learning. In the notes on the poem itself the author displays an interest in classical scholarship, Biblical commentary, ecclesiastical history, scientific inquiry, linguistics and philology, ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... Mr. Hamerton had prepared the "Etcher's Handbook" and its illustrations, and was writing a series of articles on the "Characters of Balzac" for the "Saturday Review." To save time I read to him "Le Pere Goriot," "Eugenie Grandet," "Ursule Mirouet," "Les Parents Pauvres," "La Cousine Bette," etc. Mr. Harwood approved of the series, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the life of a man wounded to the heart; seeking solitude, and shutting himself in his hotel, in the Rue Balzac, like a wolf in his den; receiving no one but Varhely, and sometimes treating even old Yanski coldly; then, suddenly emerging from his retirement, and trying to take up his life again; appearing at the meetings of the Hungarian ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... even a question to be asked. So it is, so it has been, so it will be. Homer's outlook is that of the modern realist. That he wrote an epic, and they novels, is an accident of time and space. Turgeneff or Balzac writing 1000 years before Christ would have been Homer; and Homer, writing now, would have been ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... with her beautiful Utopian genius, poured forth a torrent of rural narrative of a crystalline limpidity ("Mouny Robin," "La Mare au Diable," "La Petite Fadette," etc., 1841-1849), which is as far removed from the turbid stream of Balzac ("Les Paysans") and Zola ("La Terre"), as Paradise is from the Inferno. There is an echo of Rousseau's gospel of nature in all these tales, and the same optimistic delusion regarding "the people" for which the eighteenth century paid so dearly. The painters likewise caught the tendency, and ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Theodor than a Baiern never 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 ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to that class of men whom that witty writer, Balzac, so delightfully calls les hommes predestines in his Physiologie du Mariage. Without doubt, he was a very good-looking man, but he bore that stamp of insignificance which so often conceals coarseness and vulgarity, and was one of those men ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... tone to the society to which we are introduced. They should be clearly individualized, as in the drama, and maintain throughout a reasonable consistency. They may be taken from any class of society; and writers of large creative genius, like Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens, Balzac, will be distinguished both for the number and for the variety of their characters. It is not enough that the characters be described in their outward appearance and experiences. In all profounder work, ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... these crowds. I could only guess at some of their stories as they were written in lines of pain about the eyes and mouths of poor old spinsters such as Balzac met hiding their misery in backstairs flats of Paris tenements—they came blinking out into the fierce sunlight of the Paris streets like captive creatures let loose by an earthquake—and of young students who had eschewed delight and lived laborious ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... deserves more than a word. Like Lady Booby in Joseph Andrews, she is not a pleasant character; but the picture of the fashionable demirep, cynical, sensual, and imperious, has never been drawn more vigorously, or more completely—even by Balzac. Lastly, there is the adorable Sophia herself, whose pardon should be asked for naming her in such close proximity to her frailer sister. Byron calls her (perhaps with a slight suspicion of exigence of rhyme) too "emphatic;" meaning, apparently, to refer to ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... 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 of them ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... criticisms that make us exclaim, "Save us from such respect." The extraordinary assertion that Carlyle was "always just in speaking of living men" is safeguarded by the quotation of large utterances of injustice and contempt for Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Comte, Balzac, Hugo, Lamb, George Eliot, and disparaging patronage of Scott, of Jeffrey, of Mazzini, and of Mill. The dog-like fidelity of Boswell and Eckermann was fitting to their attitude and capacity; but the spectacle of one great writer ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... LAMB is good, and so is Thackeray, And so's Jane Austen in her pretty way; Charles Dickens, too, has pleased me quite a lot, As also have both Stevenson and Scott. I like Dumas and Balzac, and I think Lord Byron quite a dab at spreading ink; But on the whole, at home, across the sea, The author I like best is ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... last class; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and benevolence (Thackeray, Dickens), or give themselves up to bitter and fruitless statement of facts (De Balzac), or surface-painting (Scott), or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling (Byron, Beranger). Our earnest poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant (Tennyson, Carlyle); one or two, anchored, indeed, but anxious or weeping (Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning); ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... l'Enclos under the name of "Leontium," a name given her by le Marechal de Saint-Evremond, and in his eulogy upon her character, lays great stress on the genius displayed in her epistolary style. After censuring the affectation to be found in the letters of Balzac and Voiture, the learned ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... Balzac remarks: "People who are very happy are naturally stupid." Perhaps it is because he is not stupid that the boy is unhappy on the many-fountained hills. The longed-for evening soon appears—his last on the farm. He sleeps no moment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... will study! Perhaps you will learn Russian, or maybe something strange and out-of-the-ordinary, like Arabic! You dream of the moment when, speaking quite casually, you will inform your friends that you are reading the whole of the novels of Balzac; that you are studying for the law and hope to pass your "Final" "just for the fun of the thing"; that you are learning Persian, and intend to retranslate the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and discover other Eastern philosophers. In fact, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... prudential and economical tone of society starves the imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli, Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, and Reade. Their education is neglected; but the circulating library and the theatre, as well as the trout-fishing, the Notch Mountains, the Adirondac country, the tour to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... 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
... implies that the shoe in question must have been of a hard or metallic substance which could not be pressed out of shape. In the form endeared to most European children of the upper classes by Charles Perrault, the slipper is made of glass. It was first suggested by Balzac that Perrault's pantoffles de verre was due to his misunderstanding of the pantoffles de vair, or fur (the word vair is still used to indicate this in heraldry), which he had heard from his nurse or other folk-tale informant. But the step-sisters would not have been compelled to ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... aged twenty-nine, with a book just behind him that had been counted on every side the most dismal of failures, saw himself the English Balzac, saw London open like a book at his feet, saw heaven and all its glories... himself the one and only ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... (the Mercury made it known) that of late there had been added to the catalogue not only the "Essays of David Hume" and that notorious book Buckle's "History of Civilization," but even a large collection of the writings of George Sand and Balzac—these latter in the original tongue; for who, indeed, would ever venture to publish an English translation? As for the reading-room, was it not characterization enough to state that two Sunday newspapers, reeking fresh from Fleet Street, regularly appeared on the tables? What possibility ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... Irishman who brought Persia into the best regulated families. Unfortunately there was only one Omar and there were scores of imitators who, in order to make the Astronomer go round, were obliged to draw him out to the thinness of Balzac's Magic Skin. While all this was going on, the present Editor was forced to conclude that the burning literary need was not for more translators, but for more Omars to translate; and what was his surprise to note that ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... maintain that contemporary life is tabooed against novelists, but if novels of contemporary life are to be literature, are to be permanent, that life must either be treated in the spirit of romance and fantasy as by Balzac and the colossally fantastic Zola; or in the spirit of humor as by Charles de Bernard, Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens. The thrifty plan of giving us sermons, politics, fiction, all in one stodgy sandwich [laughter] produces no permanent literature, produces ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... of eternal recurrence: it forced itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere, Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and particularly of "Fecondite," ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... clearly distinct pianissimo, at the full, round tone of its relative fortissimo, that was never harsh or noisy, and at all the exquisitely graded nuances that lay between, with those time fluctuations expressive of the ebb and flow of his poetic inner being. No wonder Balzac maintained that if Chopin should but drum on the table his ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... prior record. Before bringing Sir Anthony on the scene, I feel I ought to say something more about myself, to explain why Lady Fenimore should have sent for me in so peremptory a fashion. Following the model of my favourite author Balzac—you need the awful leisure that has been mine to appreciate him—I ought to describe the house in which I live, my establishment—well, I have begun with Sergeant Marigold—and the little country town which is practically the scene of the drama ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... hostesses are pleased to offer to their guests on ceremonial occasions, and in which they shew a great regard for accuracy of costume and setting, Swann was amused to discover the heirs and successors of Balzac's 'tigers'—now 'grooms'—. who normally followed their mistress when she walked abroad, but now, hatted and booted, were posted out of doors, in front of the house on the gravelled drive, or outside the stables, as gardeners ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... [*] Balzac's description of plica polonica does not agree with that given in English medical dictionaries and cyclopedias. But as the book was written at Wierschovnia, Poland, in 1847, when he was attended by a celebrated Polish physician, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... which was founded by Merimee and Balzac found its culmination in De Maupassant. He surpassed his mentor, Flaubert, in the breadth and vividness of his work, and one of the greatest of modern French critics has recorded the deliberate opinion, that of all Taine's pupils Maupassant ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... be no difference of opinion touching the present and average mental inferiority of the female sex to the male. True enough, Balzac, by no means a woman-lover, claims: "The woman, who has received a male education, possesses in fact the most brilliant and fruitful qualities for the building of her own happiness and that of her husband;" and Goethe, who knew well ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... it again that the novel has killed the play, as some critics would persuade us—the romantic movement of France shows us that. The work of Balzac and of Hugo grew up side by side together; nay, more, were complementary to each other, though neither of them saw it. While all other forms of poetry may flourish in an ignoble age, the splendid individualism ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... this side he is incomparable and unique. Neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had so fine, so accurate, so infallible a sense of the delicate line of demarcation which divides the impressive and the terrible from the horrible and the loathsome—Victor Hugo and Honore de Balzac from Eugene Sue and Emile Zola. On his theatre we find no presentation of old men with their beards torn off and their eyes gouged out, of young men imprisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with red-hot spits. Again and again his passionate ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that Cooper does not commit is dulness. He is interesting. Of course there are some of Cooper's works that no one cares to read now. But he is to be judged by his best, not by his worst. Balzac is something of a novelist himself, and has a right to be heard. "If Cooper," says Balzac in a passage quoted by every writer who touches upon Cooper, "had succeeded in the painting of character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena of nature, he would ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... or all of these things to the schoolmistress or not—whether I stole them put of Lord Bacon—whether I cribbed them from Balzac—whether I dipt 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 can not say. Wise men have said ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... de 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, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... 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 he attained one of the highest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... mean time he was studying history for its facts and principles, and fiction for its scenery and portraits. In "The North American Review" for July, 1847, is a long and characteristic article on Balzac, of whom he was an admirer, but with no blind worship. The readers of this great story-teller, who was so long in obtaining recognition, who "made twenty assaults upon fame and had forty books killed under him" before he achieved success, will find his genius fully ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... century had become so neglected, and was so lacking in cultivation; so little 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 Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... cross." She paused and shivered as the white fog crept up to the verandah. It was very quiet. She could hear the ocean roaring through the Golden Gate. Again the presentiment assailed her. "None of those things was it," she thought in terror. "Uncle Jack Belmont says, according to Balzac, our presentiments always mean something." She noticed anew how beautiful the night was: the white wreaths floating on the water, the dark blue sky that was bursting into stars, the mysterious outline of ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... emotional power, finally, a lack of the dramatic faculty, not indeed indispensable to a novelist, but almost indispensable as an ingredient in great novels of this particular genre.[1] In temperament and vitality he is palpably inferior to the masters (Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Balzac) whom he reverenced with such a cordial admiration and envy. A 'low vitality' may account for what has been referred to as the 'nervous exhaustion' of his style. It were useless to pretend that Gissing belongs of right to the 'first series' of English Men ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... us cite merely the case of Balzac who, says one of his biographers, "was always odd." He buys a property, in order to start a dairy there with "the best cows in the world," from which he expects to receive a net income of 3,000 francs. In addition, high-grade ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... 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 one ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... crude enough to hold that anything which would shock the mind of a child, could 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 ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... for he is related to have sent to sleep and awakened a party of unruly boys at his father's school. Another story is his fooling of a Jew merchant. He had high spirits, perhaps too high, for his slender physique. He was a facile mimic, and Liszt, Balzac, Bocage, Sand and others believed that he would have made an actor of ability. With his sister Emilia he wrote a little comedy. Altogether he was a clever, if not a brilliant lad. His letters show that he was not the latter, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... venting itself in such collegians' pranks as parading deserted quarters of the town by moonlight, in the small hours, chanting lugubrious strains to astonish the shopkeepers. The only great celebrity whose acquaintance she had made was Balzac, himself the prince of eccentrics. Although he did not encourage Madame Dudevant's literary ambition, he showed himself kindly disposed towards her and her young friends, and she gives some amusing instances that came under her notice of his oddities. Thus, once after a little Bohemian ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... had been struck by the power of a book, a book written by a certain Frenchman called Balzac. He had been riveted by the hideous cynicism, the supreme power of penetration into the vilest corners of wicked hearts; and he flung the book from him at last with an ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... miserable days of the eleventh Louis. In the Paris of our day the slang varies from hour to hour; every one seems able to follow it, and no one knows who invents the constant new changes. The slang of the boarding-house in Balzac's "Pere Goriot" is quite different from that of the novels done by the Goncourt brothers; and, though I have not yet mustered courage to finish one of M. Zola's outrages, I can see that the vulgarisms which he has learned are not at all like any that ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... thirst with wine and beer everything went well; he led a methodical life and would spend his free hours on the Pinza, de Oriente or in the Moncloa, reading the two volumes that comprised his library: one, Lost Illusions, by Balzac and the other, a collection ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... again—your fine dogmatical sceptical face, by punch-light? O! one glimpse of the human face, and shake of the human hand, is better than whole reams of this cold, thin correspondence—yea, of more worth than all the letters that have sweated the fingers of sensibility from Madame Sevigne and Balzac (observe my Larning!) to Sterne ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... the Repertory is to give in alphabetical sequence the names of all the characters forming this Balzacian society, together with the salient points in their lives. It is, of course, well known that Balzac made his characters appear again and again, thus creating out of his distinct novels a miniature world. To cite a case in point, Rastignac, who comes as near being the hero of the Comedie as any ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... study, a concentrated summary, a succinct analysis of Balzac's successes and failures, and the causes of these successes and failures, and of the scope ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... impress still upon them. That their very names should have been reproduced finds explanation in the statement once made by Hawthorne to a friend, that the most vexatious detail of romance-writing, to him, was the finding of suitable names for the dramatis personae. Balzac used to look long among the shop-signs of Paris for the precise name needed by a preconceived character, and the absolute invention of such titles is doubtless very rare; few fictionists are gifted with Dickens's fertility in the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Lagier and Dejazet. They were as old as the world, but they were new to me, and I was amused and astonished. These bon-mots were followed by an account of how Gautier wrote his Sunday feuilleton, and how he and Balzac had once nearly come to blows. They had agreed to collaborate. Balzac was to contribute the scenario, Gautier the dialogue. One morning Balzac came with the scenario of the first act. "Here it is, Gautier! ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... if I should wait for seven or eight years more, now that I can no longer write. Happily, there is nothing to fear. But what I have suffered since I have been incapable of writing, and have felt my hoard of gold shrink and diminish in my hand like the Magic Skin of Balzac, is frightful. Now you understand me, do you not? and you will no longer bid me take care of myself. No; if you still pray to God, ask him to send me speedily to ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Chagrin, a story by Balzac. The hero becomes possessed of a magical wild ass's skin, which yields him the means of gratifying every wish; but for every wish thus gratified, the skin shrank somewhat, and at last vanished, having been wished entirely away. Life is ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 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 of his boyhood so vividly. ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... abstracted, reads a great deal, pull down books, fills pages of particularly ruled copy paper with figures from a big, round, black pencil until you might think he was calculating the expenditures of a Billion Dollar Congress. He is not a mathematician but, like Balzac, simply dotes on figures. Then comes the analytical stage and that he performs on foot, walking, head bent forward, upstairs, downstairs, outdoors, around the block, in again, through the clattering press room and up and down the hall. When ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... Longfellow. Again try to fancy the shy, eccentric, improvident genius of "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "The Fall of the House of Usher" at ease in a company that, while delightful, was all propriety and solid intellectuality. No, Poe would no more have fitted into the Century than Balzac or Zola would have fitted into the French Academy which so persistently denied them. And, to be perfectly frank, had the writer been a Centurion of that period, and had the name of Edgar Allan Poe come up for election, he might have been one of the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... 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
... 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 ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 round golden panel ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... 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 ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... brother of the marshal, used to say that the gallop was the gait of happy people, the natural movement of women and of fools. "The three prettiest things in the world," wrote Balzac, "are a frigate under sail, a woman dancing and a horse at full run." I leave these opinions, so essentially French, to the judgment of Americans, and turn to another point of difference in the racing customs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... 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, ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... these things must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the oafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and profound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of sense and refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac long ago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla's efforts to play the violin. Women survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great capacity for play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that often they deceive even themselves; the average woman's ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... 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 disposition. She would remain for hours ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... 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 ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... Clichy was crowded at that hour, and a lively fancy might see in the passers-by the personages of many a sordid romance. There were clerks and shopgirls; old fellows who might have stepped out of the pages of Honore de Balzac; members, male and female, of the professions which make their profit of the frailties of mankind. There is in the streets of the poorer quarters of Paris a thronging vitality which excites the blood and prepares the ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... You remember Balzac's tale of the Peau de Chagrin, and how every time the possessor used it for the accomplishment of some wish the fairy Peau shrank a little and the owner's life correspondingly shortened? I have such a desire to be well with my public that I am actually giving ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lady's library is to be found in that portion of the book-shelf which lies between the rows of books and the wall. Don't you think so, Lady Carmian?" (to the lady on his other side). "I assure you I have made the most delightful discoveries of this description. Cheap editions of Ouida, Balzac's works, yellow backs of the most advanced order, will, as a rule, reward the inquirer, who otherwise might have had to content himself with 'The Heir of Redclyffe,' the Lily Series, and Miss Strickland's 'Queens ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... I'm wasting your precious time, Jim," he 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
... useless: I am determined. Blindfold? I should say not! This is not—need I remind you again?—the Paris of Balzac and that wonderful Dumas ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... paths, so as to achieve results without which such living agency could not have occurred." Does it for an instant seem that a great scientist's theoretical speculations of the laws of the universe and of organic life have no connection with the province of art? On the contrary. Truly does Balzac exclaim: "Is not God the whole of science, the all of love, the source of poetry?" The artist is he who enters into the divine realm; who discerns the divine creations as the true ideals of humanity, and who interprets to the world the sublime significance of ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... following note has been furnished to me: "Balzac, in Une Derniere Incarnation de Vautrin, describes the morals of the French bagnes. Dostoieffsky, in Prison-Life in Siberia, touches on the same subject. See his portrait of Sirotkin, p. 52 et seq., p. 120 (edition J. and R. Maxwell, London). We may compare Carlier, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... immediate popularity and invite a host of imitators; but it was long after their time before a tale in prose, whether short or long, achieved recognition as worthy of serious critical consideration. In his study of Balzac, Brunetiere recorded the significant fact that no novelist, who was purely and simply a novelist, was elected to the French Academy in the first two centuries of its existence. And the same acute critic, in his "History of Classical French Literature," pointed out that French novels were under ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... quarters, I shall be happy to escort you whenever you like, but I do not think you will be altogether gratified with the result of your researches, and I think that you would obtain a much closer insight into French lower class life by studying Balzac and some of the modern writers—they are not always savory, but at least ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... fascinated so fascinatingly elusive a creature is a mystery to all who know him and a miracle to all who know her; but who has ever guessed the riddle of a woman's heart? Surely no man yet known to the world, except possibly Balzac, and he only occasionally by some sort of electric, psychological accident. The true story of Mrs. Blaine's infelicities has been carefully hidden from the public, although some superserviceable, would-be friends have now and then busied themselves with starting ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... predecessors in the faith. There are people who doubt whether there is any picture to be seen. I fancy, myself, that if one were to get into his studio, one would find something very like the picture in that tale of Balzac's—a mere mass of incoherent scratches and daubs, a jumble ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... eddyings-round in the same circle. I am tempted to glance at this, because of a passage which I read while this Essay was a-writing, a passage signed by a person whom I name altogether for the sake of honour, Mr. James Sully. "If we compare," says Mr. Sully, "Fielding for example with Balzac, Thackeray, or one of the great Russian novelists, we see at once what a simple toylike structure used to serve art for a human world. A mind versed in life as contemporary fiction depicts it, feels, on turning to the already ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... HUGHES, M.P., Sub-Rosa of the Daily News and Leader. Although his pen has probably covered more pages than Balzac's, this is the first time Sub-Rosa has really "turned author." The charm and penetration of the result suggest that his readers will never allow him to turn back again. He is a born essayist, but he has, in addition, the breadth and generosity that ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... realistic observation beyond the externals (which fixed the attention of Zola and Maupassant) to states of the mind: he unites the method of Stendhal to that of Balzac. He is always interesting and amusing. He takes himself seriously and persists in regarding the art of writing fiction as a science. He has wit, humor, charm, and lightness of touch, and ardently strives after philosophy and intellectuality—qualities ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... cosmopolitan. She recognised nothing less provincial than European society, and her fine folk knew each other and made love to each other from Doncaster to Bucharest. She had an idea that she resembled Balzac, and her favourite historical characters were Lucien de Rubempre and the Vidame de Pamiers. I must add that when I once asked her who the latter personage was she was unable to tell me. She was very brave and healthy and cheerful, very abundant and innocent and wicked. ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... was a pile of letters on the tray. He glanced hastily over the envelopes, swallowed his breakfast, and returned to closer inspection of the correspondence. The first letter which he opened was written by the editor of an English "Quarterly," informing him that his recent critique on Balzac had found favor in high places, and that the "Quarterly" would like to ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the deliberately antiquated black-silk dress, a gold chain and a miniature set in brilliants give the finishing touch to a style classic in its chastity. Seated in a grandfather's chair in the embrasure of the window, she reminds one of Mme. de Mortsauf in Balzac's Lys ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... furnished simply, in man fashion, with deep 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 their ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... like other voluptuaries, who must have the round year warm, and fruit and eggs always in market. Dressed in his speckled black swallow-tail coat, with his long pen in his mouth and his shirt-bosom faultlessly white, the woodpecker works like some Balzac in his garret, making the tree-top lively as he spars with his fellow-Bohemians; and being sure himself of a tree, and clinging to it with both tail and talons, he esteems everything else that lives upon it to be an insect at which he may run his bill or spit his tongue—that ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... the inside history of Fleet Street, I should be looked upon as the most wonderful exponent of human life that had ever touched a pen. Balzac—whom everybody talks of and nobody has read, because the discrimination of Paternoster Row has refused him a translation till quite lately—Zola, who professes to be realistic, who is nothing if not realistic, but whose writings are so curiously crude and merely ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... imperishable temple, discovered the soul of Aristophanes. To the grocers and statesmen of Queen Victoria it seemed otherwise. Their taste was a good deal nicer than that of Plato, or of Shakespeare for that matter, or of Dante, Rabelais, Catullus, Voltaire,[10] Gibbon or Balzac, to say nothing of St. Chrysostom (who could not sleep without an Aristophanes under his pillow) or the author of "The Song of Solomon." They did not like vulgarity and they put a stop to it: also in that age ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... attitude of the American business man toward his business is pre-eminently the attitude of an artist. You may say that he loves money. So do we all—artists particularly. No stock-broker's private journal could be more full of dollars than Balzac's intimate correspondence is full of francs. But whereas the ordinary artist loves money chiefly because it represents luxury, the American business man loves it chiefly because it is the sole proof of success in his endeavor. He loves his business. It is ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... but it was odd enough to notice that they stood close together, touching each other, while all the rest were straggling and separate. I observed that peculiar atmospheric flavor which has been described by Mr. Balzac, (the French story-teller who borrows so many things from some of our American loading writers,) under the name of odeur de pension. It is, as one may say, an olfactory perspective of an endless vista of departed breakfasts, dinners, and suppers. It is similar, if not identical, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... 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 her education was, held her drawing-room, where nothing ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... 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 ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the point where she abandons the domestic sewing-basket to reappear smoking black cigars in the Latin Quarter. We find her, at about 1831, entering into competition with the brilliant literary generation of Balzac, Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Merimee, Stendhal, and Sainte-Beuve. To signalize her equality with her brothers in talent, she adopts male attire: "I had a sentry-box coat made, of rough grey cloth, with trousers and waist-coat to match. With a grey hat and a huge cravat of woolen ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... Greek painter. The example is the more notable because Gustave Dore's is not a common mind, and, if born in any other epoch, he would probably have done valuable (though never first rate) work; but by glancing (it will be impossible for you to do more than glance) at his illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and England only an effervescence from the cloaca maxima of the putrid instincts which fasten themselves ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... central fact in the world, as Canon Lyttelton remarks, to "dirty-minded school-boys, grooms, garden-boys, anyone, in short, who at an early age may be sufficiently defiled and sufficiently reckless to talk of them." And, so far as girls are concerned, as Balzac long ago remarked, "a mother may bring up her daughter severely, and cover her beneath her wings for seventeen years; but a servant-girl can destroy that long work by a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... published for 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 best ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... other property, however, than a principal share in an influential journal, to which he was a lively and sparkling contributor. In his youth, under the reign of Louis Philippe, he had been a chief among literary exquisites; and Balzac was said to have taken him more than once as his model for those brilliant young vauriens who figure in the great novelist's comedy of Human Life. The Vicomte's fashion expired ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 of French peasants by one of his old soldiers—a man named Goguelat. It covers more time chronologically ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... four chansons of the thirteenth century, including Berte aus grans Pies, and one of the forms of part of Ogier. Other names—Bertrand of Bar sur Aube, Pierre de Rieu, Gerard d'Amiens, Raimbert de Paris, Brianchon (almost a character of Balzac!), Gautier of Douai, Nicolas of Padua (an interesting person who was warned in a dream to save his soul by compiling a chanson), Herbert of Dammartin, Guillaume de Bapaume, Huon de Villeneuve—are mere shadows of names to which in nearly all cases no personality ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... literary ambition was never completely fulfilled. It was a somewhat programmatic plan to give a picture of contemporary life in all its various aspects and interrelations under the general title of the Heritage of Cain. This idea was probably derived from Balzac's Comedie Humaine. The whole was to be divided into six subdivisions with the general titles Love, Property, Money, The State, War, and Death. Each of these divisions in its turn consisted of six novels, of which the last was intended to summarize the author's conclusions and to present ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... all kinds of clever people. All her thoughts and feelings circled around Paris. When Panshine made literature the subject of the conversation, it turned out that she, like him, had read nothing but French books. George Sand irritated her; Balzac she esteemed, although he wearied her; to Eugene Sue and Scribe she ascribed a profound knowledge of the human heart; Dumas and Feval she adored. In reality she preferred Paul de Kock to all the others; but, as may be supposed, she did not even mention his ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... all 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 books, ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... looking at her from between his arms, he plunged his eyes into hers. "I have heard some talk of the mad passion of a certain Entragues," he went on wildly. "Ever since their grandfather, the soldier Balzac, married a viscontessa at Milan that family hold their ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... reform? Balzac says he doesn't. So far as my experience goes, it agrees with that of Balzac—a fact the admirers of that author are at liberty to make what use ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... beautiful home, full of art treasures. A number of guests had been invited. Clemens naturally led the dinner-talk, which eventually drifted to reading. He told of Mrs. Clemens's embarrassment when Stepniak had visited them and talked books, and asked her what her husband thought of Balzac, Thackeray, and the others. She had been obliged to say that he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... occasions, and 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
... a force. The time that saw the victory of industrialism saw as well the revival or the attempted revival of medieval modes of feeling. Cardinal Newman was as typical a figure of nineteenth-century life as was Balzac. The men who had created the new world felt within themselves a passionate desire to escape out of the present into the past once more. They felt themselves victors and vanquished, powerful and yet bereft ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Tono-Bungay, that's got aerial experiments in it, and Jude the Ob—, Obscure, I guess it is, and The Damnation of Theron Ware (wonder what he damned), and McTeague, and Walden, and War and Peace, and Madame Bovary, and some Turgenev and some Balzac. And something more serious. Guess I'll try William James's ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... something nasty in him somewhere, Balzac said so, and he was the sort of chap who knew; if we were all perfect this wouldn't be earth," ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... those who did not wish to be bound by the stiffness of the court. 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, like ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... like Beethoven. The mere sight of the work of Pheidias is like breathing pure health-giving air. Milton and Dante were steeped in religious patriotism; Goethe was pervaded with philosophy, and Balzac with scientific curiosity. Ariosto, Cervantes, and even Boccaccio are masters in the mysteries of common life. In all these cases the tone of the artist's mind is felt throughout his work: what he paints, or sings, or writes, conveys ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... in the prime of life, I knew nothing of Racine. I now bend my head in adoration. Again, I knew little or nothing of Balzac. I now think of him as one of the greatest of the analysts of human conduct,—not as great as Shakespeare, but, all the same, very great, and almost as terrible as he is great. If ever a man fascinates and is intolerable, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... went. They were amazing trollops, painted until, like the picture of Balzac's madman, they were chaotic, a mere mess of frantic colours. Not for these, I thought, did Smain play his flute. The time wore on. I grew drowsy in the keef-laden air, despite the incessant uproar of the pipes. Suddenly ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... caution of a tyrant grown timid through age. The conspiracy is, with a splendid narration, thrust into the background; it does not excite in us that gloomy apprehension which so theatrical an object ought to do. Emilia, the soul of the piece, is called by the witty Balzac, when commending the work, "an adorable fury." Yet the Furies themselves could be appeased by purifications and expiations: but Emilia's heart is inaccessible to the softening influences of benevolence and generosity; ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... woman whom he 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 is neither ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... as you look at 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 of Chesterton is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... physical, astral, and mental planes of modern Theosophy. They may be thought of as universal substance in three different octaves of vibration. Upon this, the trained will of man is able to act directly, for the reason that—as claimed by Balzac—it is ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... consequent failure lie. No one who merely knows at second hand Homer, Herodotus, Plautus, Terence, Horace, Virgil, Montaigne, Le Sage (a metonym for Gil Blas), Cervantes, La Fontaine, Dumas, Maupassant, Balzac, can have had an opportunity of forming an adequate and just estimate of those authors. You might nearly as soon expect a Frenchman to relish Butler or ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt |
