All e-books of Honoré de Balzac

Mme. Vauquer (_nee_ de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter a...

TO A LORD 1845 I--GILLETTE On a cold December morning in the year 1612, a young man, whose clothing was somewhat of the thinnest, was walking to and fro before a gateway in the Rue des Grands...

I was buried in one of those profound reveries to which everybody, even a frivolous man, is subject in the midst of the most uproarious festivities.

There is that old Box-coat again!"

I. THE TALISMAN Towards the end of the month of October 1829 a young man entered the Palais-Royal just as the gaming-houses opened, agreeably to the law which protects a passion by its very natur...

DROLL STORIES COLLECTED FROM THE ABBEYS OF TOURAINE BY HONORE DE BALZAC TRANSLATORS PREFACE...

"The whole show is dreadful," she cried coming out of the menagerie of M. Martin.

I There are houses in certain provincial towns whose aspect inspires melancholy, akin to that called forth by sombre cloisters, dreary moorlands, or the desolation of ruins.

One day, about the middle of July 1838, one of the carriages, then lately introduced to Paris cabstands, and known as _Milords_, was driving down the Rue de l'Universite, conveying a stout man of m...

THE HUMAN COMEDY INTRODUCTIONS AND APPENDIX By Honore De Balzac Note: This reposting is dedicated to Dagny, who, 10 years ago, was part of the "Balzac Team" which produce...

frosts.

Napoleon, you see, my friends, was born in Corsica, which is a French island warmed by the Italian sun; it is like a furnace there, everything is scorched up, and they keep on killing each other fr...

CATHERINE DE' MEDICI By Honore de Balzac Translated by Katherine Prescott Wormeley DEDICATION To Monsieur le Marquis de Pastoret, Member of the Academie des ...

FERRAGUS, CHIEF OF THE DEVORANTS By Honore De Balzac Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley PREPARER'S NOTE: Ferragus is the first part of a trilogy.

CHAPTER I. TWO CHILDHOODS To what genius fed on tears shall we some day owe that most touching of all elegies,--the tale of tortures borne silently by souls whose tender roots find stony ground in...

ESTHER HAPPY; OR, HOW A COURTESAN CAN LOVE In 1824, at the last opera ball of the season, several masks were struck by the beauty of a youth who was wandering about the passages and greenroom with...

INTRODUCTION The longest, without exception, of Balzac's books, and one which contains hardly any passage that is not very nearly of his best, _Illusions Perdues_ suffers, I think, a little in p...

One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is, surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace--a people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny.

PART I Mme. de Bargeton and Lucien de Rubempre had left Angouleme behind, and were traveling together upon the road to Paris.

CHAPTER I. SERAPHITUS As the eye glances over a map of the coasts of Norway, can the imagination fail to marvel at their fantastic indentations and serrated edges, like a granite lace, against wh...

CHAPTER I. THE RABOURDIN HOUSEHOLD In Paris, where men of thought and study bear a certain likeness to one another, living as they do in a common centre, you must have met with several resembling...

In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands a convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule instituted by St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first rigor...

Towards three o'clock in the afternoon of one October day in the year 1844, a man of sixty or thereabouts, whom anybody might have credited with more than his actual age, was walking along the Boul...

I. EARLY MISTAKES It was a Sunday morning in the beginning of April 1813, a morning which gave promise of one of those bright days when Parisians, for the first time in the year, behold dry paveme...

It was one o'clock in the morning, during the winter of 1829-30, but in the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu's salon two persons stayed on who did not belong to her family circle.

Half-way down the Rue Saint-Denis, almost at the corner of the Rue du Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful houses which enable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy.

By Honore De Balzac Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley and Ellen Marriage DEDICATION To Hector Berlioz.

"Come, Deputy of the Centre, come along!

I. AN AMBUSCADE Early in the year VIII., at the beginning of Vendemiaire, or, to conform to our own calendar, towards the close of September, 1799, a hundred or so of peasants and a large number o...

"Ah!

CHAPTER I. AN OLD MONASTERY "Come, deputy of the Centre, forward!

I Early in the autumn of 1826 the Abbe Birotteau, the principal personage of this history, was overtaken by a shower of rain as he returned home from a friend's house, where he had been passing t...

CHAPTER I. PROLOGUE In the year 1800, toward the close of October, a foreigner, accompanied by a woman and a little girl, was standing for a long time in front of the palace of the Tuileries, nea...

CHAPTER I. THE CHATEAU Les Aigues, August 6, 1823.

On the 22nd of January, 1793, towards eight o'clock in the evening, an old lady came down the steep street that comes to an end opposite the Church of Saint Laurent in the Faubourg Saint Martin.

CHAPTER I There is a house at Douai in the rue de Paris, whose aspect, interior arrangements, and details have preserved, to a greater degree than those of other domiciles, the characteristics of ...

By Honore De Balzac Translated By Clara Bell and James Waring TO THE READER At the very outset of the writer's literary career, a friend, long since dead, gave him the subject of this Study.

Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of theoretical physiology, and who, while still young, made himself a celebrity in the medical school of Paris, that central luminary to whi...

By Honore De Balzac Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell "For a wounded heart--shadow and silence."

In the early spring of 1822, the Paris doctors sent to Lower Normandy a young man just recovering from an inflammatory complaint, brought on by overstudy, or perhaps by excess of some other kind.

CHAPTER I In 1792 the townspeople of Issoudun enjoyed the services of a physician named Rouget, whom they held to be a man of consummate malignity.

In I know not what year a Parisian banker, who had very extensive commercial relations with Germany, was entertaining at dinner one of those friends whom men of business often make in the markets o...

CHAPTER I. DEPARTING PARIS The tourniquet Saint-Jean, the narrow passage entered through a turnstile, a description of which was said to be so wearisome in the study entitled "A Double Life" (Scen...

_LOUIS LAMBERT_ 145 (_Louis Lambert_) _THE EXILES_ (_Les Proscrits_) ALMAE SORORI ...

I once used to live in a little street which probably is not known to you--the Rue de Lesdiguieres.

CHAPTER I. THE TWO MARIES In one of the finest houses of the rue Neuve-des-Mathurins, at half-past eleven at night, two young women were sitting before the fireplace of a boudoir hung with blue v...

PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE By Honore De Balzac PART FIRST PREFACE IN WHICH EVERY ONE WILL FIND HIS OWN IMPRESSIONS OF MARRIAGE.

PARIS, September.

Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in measuring the future.

out, or held under, by some mysterious mechanism.