"Balzac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Count, it is useless: I am determined. Blindfold? I should say not! This is not—need I remind you again?—the Paris of Balzac and that wonderful ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... is somewhat remarkable that Balzac, dealing as he did with traits of character and the minute and daily circumstances of life, has never been accused of representing actual persons in the two or three thousand portraits which he painted of ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... herself entirely to you and does not ask you (sublime self-denial!), that you should love her, but only that you should let her love you. Balzac extolled the women of thirty; that was because he had not tasted those of forty. Ah! the ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... besides the strange Greek, Latin, Italian, German, and Swiss words, foreign phrases, and Spanish jargon, introduced by foreigners, so that a poor writer has plenty of elbow room in this Babelish language, which has since been taken in hand by Messieurs de Balzac, Blaise Pascal, Furetiere, Menage, St. Evremonde, de Malherbe, and others, who first cleaned out the French language, sent foreign words to the rightabout, and gave the right of citizenship to legitimate words used and known by everyone, but of which ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... 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 all ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... where he bathed in the newer Germanic philosophies. Finally he took a course of law at Columbia University. The influence of this somewhat heterogeneous seminary life is manifest in all his future writing. Beginning, no doubt, as a disciple of Emerson in New England, he fell under the spell of Balzac in Paris, of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann in Germany. Pages might be brought forward as evidence that he had a thorough classical education. His knowledge of languages made it easy for him to drink deeply at many fountain heads. If Oscar ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... ships! Will you believe me, I had rather my little chateau, my vineyard, and my wheat fields, than all the orders.... Eh, well, my country: there must be some magic in that phrase. Of all loves, that of country is the most lasting. Is that Balzac? I do not recall. Only once in a century do we find a man who is willing to betray his country, and even then he may have for his purpose neither hate, revenge, nor love of power." A peculiar gravity sat on his mobile face, caused, perhaps, by ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... all the same. Nothing but love, love, love; what silly nonsense it is! Why don't people write about the really important things of life? Some of the French novelists do; several of Balzac's, for instance. I have just been reading his "Cousin Pons," a terrible book, but I enjoyed it ever so much because it was nothing like a love story. What rubbish is ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... 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 ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... M. BALZAC's recent marriage, at his rather advanced period of life, finds him, for the first time, an invalid, and serious fears are now entertained for him, by friends ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... do we know that it is so now, even under the best of Republics. There are strange 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
... The book did not prove a great success, though its undoubted ability attracted attention to the writer and opened the way to some journalistic work. About this time he appears to have been studying Balzac, and the recently published Madame Bovary of Flaubert, which was opening up a new world not only in French fiction, but in the literature of Europe. He had also read the Germinie Lacerteux of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, on which he wrote an appreciative article, and this remarkable book cannot ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... boarding-house, where people cannot conceal their real characters." I was an admirer of La Chartreuse de Parme, and it appeared to me that one could not do better than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the magnificent boarding-house in Balzac's Pere Goriot,—the "pension bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres," kept by Madame Vauquer, nee De Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I hoped for better things from the Pension ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... great spirits arose as La Bruyere, Moliere, La Fontaine, Madame de Sevigne. "O," exclaimed the Chatelaine des Rochers, "what capital company he is, the dear man! he is my old friend; and just for the reason that he is so, he always seems new. My God! how full is that book of sense!" Balzac said that he had carried human reason as far and as high as it could go, both in politics and in morals. On the other hand, Malebranche and the writers of Port Royal were against him; some reprehended ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... 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 ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... bad wife when he had conceived the character of Beatrice he ought to have been ashamed of himself: he had failed not only in his life, he had failed in his art. If Balzac got into rows with his publishers he ought to be rebuked and not commiserated, having evolved so many consistent business men from his own inside. The German Emperor is a poet, and therefore he succeeds, because poetry is so much nearer to reality ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... him somewhere, Balzac said so, and he was the sort of chap who knew; if we were all perfect this ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... style to publish the praise of stylelessness. Within the last few weeks I have seen it suggested by two different critics that the hasty writing which has left its mark on so much of the work of Scott and Balzac was a good thing and almost a necessity of genius. It is no longer taken for granted, as it was in the days of Stevenson, that the starry word is worth the pains of discovery. Stevenson, indeed, is commonly ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... 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 novel. Even where the changes are not so extensive, as ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... 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
... that discovery. The stroke that he saw in the hand of the successful business men about him is the stroke also of the master painter, scientist, actor, singer, prize fighter. It was the hand of Whistler, Balzac, Agassiz, and Terry McGovern. The sense of it had been in him when as a boy he watched the totals grow in the yellow bankbook, and now and then he recognised it in Telfer talking on a country road. ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... French 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, that observation and reflection gave rise to a more natural turn of thought and composition ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... half-queenly, half-motherly way, corrects, rebukes his deficiencies, undertakes to teach him his duty as a servant. The romance of the "Petit Jehan de Saintre," written in the fifteenth century, but telling, with a delicacy of cynicism worthy of Balzac, what must have been the old, old story of the whole feudal Middle Ages, shows the manner in which, while feeling that he is being trained to knightly courtesy and honour, the young man in the service of a great feudal lady is gradually taught dissimulation, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... 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 a peau d'ane,[TN-74] for ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... said of many vicomtes one meets at Paris. He had no 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 with the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Thierry, Sismondi, Thiers, Mignet, Martin, Michelet, and others. Poetry and the Drama; Rise of the Romantic School: Beranger, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and others; Les Parnassiens. Fiction: Hugo, Gautier, Dumas, Merimee, Balzac, Sand, Sandeau, and others. Criticism: Sainte-Beuve, Taine, and ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Here we find excellent translations of the German poets by Zhukovsky, and the poems of Lermontov and Pushkin, all impregnated with the spirit of Byron. But these two movements came quickly to an end. Soon realism, under the influence of Dickens and Balzac, installed itself as master of this literature, and, in spite of the repeated efforts of the symbolist schools, nothing has yet been able to wipe it out. Thus, the triumph of realism was not, as in the case of earlier tendencies, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... a novelist that the fame of Claretie will endure. He has followed the footsteps of George Sand and of Balzac. He belongs to the school of "Impressionists," and, although he has a liking for exceptional situations, wherefrom humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... be given in the second volume of this series; and it is not uninteresting to observe that the witness, William Young, is none other than the asserted original of the immortal Mr Adams himself. He might, on Balzac's plea in a tolerably well-known anecdote, have demanded half of the L183, 11s. Of the other origins of the book we have a pretty full account, partly documentary. That it is "writ in the manner of Cervantes," ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... appeared: I refer to the way it puts before the reader a great variety of human beings, so that a sense of teeming existence is given, a genuine imitation of the spatial complexity of life, if not of its depths. It is this effect, afterwards conveyed in fuller measure by Balzac, by Dickens, by Victor Hugo and by Tolstoy, that gives us the feeling that we are in the presence of a master of men, whatever his ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... the procuress Staphyla lay in wait for the virgin Planesium. The Barriere du Combat is not the Coliseum, but people are as ferocious there as though Caesar were looking on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet, but, if Virgil haunted the Roman wine-shop, David d'Angers, Balzac and Charlet have sat at the tables of Parisian taverns. Paris reigns. Geniuses flash forth there, the red tails prosper there. Adonai passes on his chariot with its twelve wheels of thunder ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... character in American life. Literature has not yet got hold of him, and perhaps his evolution is not far enough advanced to make him as serviceable as the soldier of the Republic and the Empire, the relic of the Old Guard, was to Hugo and Balzac, the trooper of Italy and Egypt, the maimed hero of Borodino and Waterloo, who expected again the coming of the Little Corporal. It takes time to develop a character, and to throw the glamour of romance ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and that it could not be realized without an aloofness from, if not an actual indifference to, the ideals which are spreading so rapidly over Europe. Is it possible for any nationality to make such a defense of its isolation? If not, let us read Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoi, men so much greater than any we can show, try to absorb their universal wisdom, and no longer confine ourselves to local traditions. But nationality was never so strong in Ireland as at the present time. It is beginning to be ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... his wealthy parents wished to make him a notary. He announced his determination to become an author. "But" urged the father, "do you not know to what state the occupation of a writer will lead you? In literature a man must be either king or a hodman." "Very well," replied Balzac, "I will be king!" The family left town; the youth was left to his fate in a garret, with the magnificent allowance of twenty-five francs a month. The first ten years he fought with poverty and all its evils; the second decade made him his own master. These ten years, ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... 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 ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... answering her calumniators and paying a tribute to her memory. This spirit of chivalry is certainly admirable, albeit the results may show as more partisan than accurate. It is interesting to compare this with Honore de Balzac's more extended work, "Sur Catherine de Medicis," which is designated as a romance but is actually a careful historical portrait of ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... 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, as in George Eliot, there will be an unveiling of the hidden springs of motive and disposition. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... repulsive, no drudge was so mean, no criminal was so atrocious, but what Charles Dickens could feel for him some ray of sympathy, or extract some pathetic mirth out of his abject state. And Dickens does not look on the mean and the vile as do Balzac and Zola, that is, from without, like the detective or the surgeon. He sees things more or less from their point of view: he feels with the Marchioness: he himself as a child was once a Smike: he cannot help liking the fun of the Artful ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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 ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... 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 did not ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... places of this work, but I never did it out of choice: 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 one ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... Europe during the ensuing two years I prefer to dwell as lightly as possible. I had long anticipated a sojourn in divers old-world cities; but the London I had looked to find was the London of Dickens, say, and my Paris the Paris of Dumas, or at the very least of Balzac. It is needless to mention that in the circles to which the, quite real, friendship of John Charteris afforded an entry I found little that smacked of such antiquity. I had entered a world inhabited by people who amused themselves and apparently did nothing else; and I was ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... 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
... any 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), ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... 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 ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... minister to them? It is so difficult, Anna, to find in the history of our manners and morals a subject that is worthy of your eyes, that no choice has been left me; but perhaps you will be made to feel how fortunate your fate is when you read the story sent to you by Your old friend, De Balzac. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... doubted about anything; one could see that she had conversed much with clever men of all kinds. All her ideas, all her feelings revolved round Paris. Panshin turned the conversation upon literature; it seemed that, like himself, she read only French books. George Sand drove her to exasperation, Balzac she respected, but he wearied her; in Sue and Scribe she saw great knowledge of human nature, Dumas and Feval she adored. In her heart she preferred Paul de Kock to all of them, but of course she did not even mention his name. To tell the truth, literature had no great interest for her. ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... with such an art of distinguishing 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
... himself reckons two hundred and sixty-six drawings done in one year. His "Labors of Hercules" was brought out in 1848, when he was sixteen, and before he was twenty-seven he had published his "Holy Russia," his "Wandering Jew," his illustrations to Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," to Rabelais, and many other authors. His best work was done at an age when most artists are painfully acquiring the rudiments of their art. We all know ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... her favourite bard from the period when she first could feel: and she had subsequently improved her mind by a sedulous study of novels of the great modern authors of the French language. There was not a romance of Balzac and George Sand which the indefatigable little creature had not devoured—by the time she was sixteen: and, however little she sympathised with her relatives at home, she had friends, as she said, in the spirit-world, meaning the tender Indiana, the passionate ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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, but although my husband admired Balzac's talent greatly, he disliked ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... several Spanish and Italian books in the library of the little apartments. The "Pastor Fido," "Aminta," and the "Gerusalemme " seemed to me, at first, to be the favourite works. Then came Voiture's letters, the writings of Malherbe and De Balzac, the Fables of La Fontaine, the Satires of Boileau, and the delightful comedies of Moliere. Corneille's tragedies had been ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... like the rest, 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, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... back to him, drawing a low wicker chair near the couch and putting her music on the floor beside her. "I shall be glad to stay if you want me to. Shall we talk?" And here she took up the books he had put beside him for amusement. "Balzac, Daudet." She made a little ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... 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 ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... 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 ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... and 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 I started—Safti ...
— Smain; and Safti's Summer Day - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... reformatory, afterward obtaining a commutation to life imprisonment, and now a man of more than forty years, bearing upon his body terrible scars of severities practised upon him for trying to resist wrongs which no manly man could tamely endure. A Balzac might find in him a more human and lovable Vautrin; a Victor Hugo could make him the hero of another Les Miserables; a Charles Reade could win new renown by summoning us to put ourselves in his place. But the best service ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... and even 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, it ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... sufficient for the development of a system. Probably nobody will doubt some of the more common statements; all will grant with Winkelmann that a beautiful hand is in keeping with a beautiful soul; or with Balzac that people of considerable intellect have handsome hands, or in calling the hand man's second face. But when specific co-ordinations of the hand are made these meet with much doubt. So for example, Esser[1] calls the elementary hand essentially ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac,[13] and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 the dramatists of ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... is a piece of masterly tragi-comedy. When I say that this scene is suggestive of Balzac, I mean ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... 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 conviction that he can ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... tremendous philosopher, supposing that 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, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... determined that her son should not marry "a penniless girl whose education had been so flagrantly neglected, who was vain and flighty, with a mocking humour and a conspicuous lack of principle." At this point the story becomes exceedingly interesting. A Balzac would strip it of its romantic trappings, and would penetrate into its physiology. Out of Rosina's sight, and diverted by the excess of his literary labours, Edward's infatuation began to decline. His mother, whose power of character ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... ideas bodied 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 ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... etherial, and the empyreal worlds of Greek philosophy, and to the 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
... brings both celebrity and wealth. Beyond the borders of his own language he swiftly won a popularity both with the broad public and with the professed critics of literature, second only to that of Victor Hugo and still surpassing that of Balzac, who is only of late beginning to receive from us the attention he has so ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... mistaken inductions wherewith to console myself. I do not know a more exasperating frame of mind, at least for a constructor of theories. I could not write, and so I took up a French novel (I model myself a little on Balzac). I had been turning over its pages but a few moments when Simpson knocked, and, entering softly, said, with just a shadow of a smile on his well-trained face, "Miss Grief." I briefly consigned Miss Grief ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... 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 of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... not this expansion of youthful rubbish which makes the true movement of the centuries?... Poor stuff enough, very likely, they talked, those long-haired, loose-collared Romanticists of the Hotel Pimodan and the literary cafes recorded by Balzac, Jeunes Frances, or whatever their names; and priggery, as well as blood-and-thunder, those lads round the table d'hote at Strasburg, where Jung-Stilling noticed the entrance of a certain tall, Apolline young man ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... of significant workmanship, as it is the essential of faith in religion. The great workmen have all put away the illusions of the world, or most of them, and all have told the same story—look to Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Balzac, Tolstoi, only to mention a little group of the nearer names. In their mid-years they served men, as they fancied men wanted to be served; and then they met the lie of this exterior purpose, confronted ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... "Oyster Feast," on the opposite page, seems to me to be the girl kneeling in the corner. Here is drawing indeed. The charge brought by the mysterious painter in Balzac's story against Pourbus, that one was unable to walk behind the figure in his picture, could never hold with Jan Steen. His every figure stands out surrounded by atmosphere, and never more so than in the "Oyster Feast". Again, in the "Cat's Dancing Lesson" (opposite page 158), what drawing ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... 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
... "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 ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... plentiful degree, notwithstanding his giving it second place in comparison with imagination. His novels are the novels of ideas dear to Balzac, though tinged with romance—a Stendhal of the sea. Gustave Kahn called him un puissant reveur, and might have added, a wonderful spinner of yarns. Such yarns—for men and women and children! At times yarning seemingly for the sake of yarning—true ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... novelist is expected to pay as much attention to the heroine's parents as though he were a suitor for her hand. Indeed, there is no relative of hero or heroine too humble or stupid for such a novelist as the great Balzac. He will invite the dullest of them to stay with him for quite prolonged visits, and without a murmur set apart a suite of chapters for their accommodation. I'm not sure that the humanity of the reader in these cases is of such comprehensive sympathy as the novelist's, ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... 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 have ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... 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, but he defended himself; alleging, that other ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... 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 ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... a serene indifference to hubbub. I like Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe, Balzac, Darwin, and other sages, for having been so concentrated on this or that eternal verity in art or science or philosophy, that they paid no heed to alarums and excursions which were sweeping all other folk off their feet. It is with some shame that I haunt the tape-machine whenever ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... 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 ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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. Come, let us make ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... can recognise, and these they value. But to those more exquisite refinements of proficiency and finish, which the artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip," for which, day after day, he recasts and revises and rejects - the gross mass of the public must be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity may possibly ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... husband ever 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
... finished 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 of his ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... Balzac has recorded some unforgettable types of those poor and notable lives, at once so humble and so lofty. He has described the village cur and the country doctor. But how we should have loved to encounter in his gallery, among ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... 'I think 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 of ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... 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 a law which gives conquerors ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... a real talent for hard work, not that occasional exclusive devotion to it during the throes of composition to which Balzac gave himself up night and day to an extent that utterly isolated him from the world for the time being, but steady, systematic, willing labor,—a labor, I might say, of love, for he never begrudged it,—which began every morning, when nothing special interfered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... an example like those in Balzac or the religious books," said the Breton, crossing himself. "I have been here many years, and never before did I come here, and again. Jamais de la vie! I must begin ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... 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 literary coteries that arose ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... effervescence of her student-friends 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 ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Kant, and wonders if he is 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 that she is losing her grip on art and also on God, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... to trace this quotation, which may possibly be from the Mishkat-ul-Masabih (ante, Chapter 5, note 10). Compare '"There is nothing more horrible than the rebellion of a sheep", said de Marsay' (Balzac, Lost ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... His attitude, the attitude of an old and understanding professor, shaking his head musingly as his tender pupils, unmellowed yet in the autumnal fragrances of life, giggle covertly over the pages of Balzac and Flaubert, over the nudes of Manet, over even the innocent ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... I have been reading Balzac's Peau de Chagrin. You have all read the story, I hope, for it is the first of his wonderful romances which fixed the eyes of the reading world upon him, and is a most fascinating if somewhat fantastic tale. A young man becomes the possessor of a certain magic skin, ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... reasoning faculty, means the diminution of misdeeds. (Do not imagine I am hinting that you 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.' ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... labyrinth, as Jansoulet's voice, guiding his friend, with a "This way, old fellow—lean on me," gradually died away, a stray beam of the setting sun fell upon the plateau behind them, and lighted the colossal bust of Balzac looking after them with its expressive face, its noble brow from which the long hair was brushed back, its powerful ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 disposition. She would remain for hours on a cushion, wide-awake ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... is a certain grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing lucidity. Her knowledge of the seamy side of life was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain states, her realization of certain motives, suggests Balzac rather than any of the Brontes. Thackeray, with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes, would have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's ultimatum to her husband. The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through the long emptiness of Anne's novel. But ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... 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 ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... Fitzgerald's rather scornful characterization of the French critics who received the work as Sterne's (see Life of Sterne, 1864, II, p.429). Hdouin refers to Jules Janin ("Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de Sterne") and Balzac ("Physiologie du mariage," Meditation xvii,) as citing from the work as genuine. Barbey d'Aurevilly is, however, noted as contending in la Patrie against the authenticity. This is probably the article ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... by virtue of a special dispensation on the part of their author, who made for them an eighth division therein, thus giving them a local habitation and a name. Although they come far down in the list of titles, their creation belongs almost to the formative era. Balzac had just shaken his skirts clear of the immature dust of the Oeuvres de Jeunesse, and by the publication, in 1829, of The Chouans, had made his first real bow to his larger public. In December of that same year appeared the Physiology of Marriage, followed eleven months ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... he was 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 ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... 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 ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... 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
... 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 ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... scene. They are not so debonnaires in the presence of their problems. In a sense, for that reason, they understand them better. There is very little feeling of the desert, the illimitable space, where, according to Balzac, God is and man is not, in the "Hagar and Ishmael;" indeed there seems to have been no attempt on the part of the painter to express any. True as his sand-heap is, you feel somehow that there may be a kitchen-garden or the entrance to a coal-mine ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... "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 surrendering ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... 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 ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... achieved by Robson in the dramas I have named was extended, and was genuine. In Daddy Hardacre, a skilful adaptation of the usurer in Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet," he was tremendous. It made me more than ever wishful to see him in the griping, ruthless Overreach, foiled at last in his wicked ambition and driven to frenzy by the destruction of the document by which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... "The Balzac of Dartmore. It is easy and true to say that Mr. Phillpotts in all his work has done no single piece of portraiture better than this presentation of Philip Ouldsbroom.... A triumph of the novelist's understanding ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... boards which alone separated one storey from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless salon, would lie back in the rickety armchair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another comedie humaine unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 soul for ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... collection of impieties and obscenities, published with the greatest impudence, and well deserved their destruction. On one occasion he travelled to Holland with Balzac, and used this opportunity for bringing out an infamous charge against him, which he had most probably invented. His book, the cause of all his woes, was burnt with ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... 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, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... IX. of 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 he attained one of the highest ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... something of the historic 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 ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... they inhabit, some of the 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 ...
— A Summary History of the Palazzo Dandolo • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... completed this interesting family, and she was uncommon too. By no means young, what Balzac calls "a woman of canonical age," she resembled Pere Grandet's tall Nanon. Like Nanon, she had been the devoted servant of the family for nearly a quarter of a century, and like her, had no interest outside that of her master and mistress. She was always working, rarely went out, spoke little, ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... Vinci. Raising his eyes, the parson read through the titles of Mr Browning's work. Tennyson was in a cheap seven-and-six edition; then came 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; add to this ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... sucked back again with no less 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 ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... be alarmed, Lady Audley," he said, gravely. "You have no sentimental nonsense, no silly infatuation, borrowed from Balzac or Dumas fils, to fear from me. The benchers of the Inner Temple will tell you that Robert Audley is troubled with none of the epidemics whose outward signs are turn-down collars and Byronic neckties. I say ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... achievement. The uniquest thing yet done by Mr. GUNN. He has eclipsed Balzac, wiped the floor with George Sand, while panting Tolstoi 'toils after ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... you perceive, had reckoned without his host, or, to speak more precisely, without his idiot brother—an item of so uncertain and fluctuating a character, that I doubt whether he would not have puzzled the astute heroes of M. de Balzac, whose foresight is so remarkably ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot |
