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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 middle height in the uniform of a captain of the National Guard.Among the...
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 and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the...
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 Monsieur Rabourdin, whose acquaintance we are about to make at a moment when he is head of a bureau in one of...
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 Boulevard des Italiens with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some...
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. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled...
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. Within these houses there is, perhaps, the silence of the cloister, the barrenness of moors, the...
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 of citizens, who had left Fougeres in the morning on their way to Mayenne, were going up...
Few persons in the present day know how plain and unpretentious were the dwellings of the burghers of Paris in the sixteenth century, and how simple their lives. Perhaps this simplicity of habits and of thought was the cause of the grandeur of that old bourgeoisie which...
Monsieur Goriot is one of a disparate group of lodgers at Mademe Vauquer's dingy Parisian boarding house. At first his wealth inspires respect, but as his circumstances are mysteriously reduced he becomes shunned by those around him, and soon his only remaining visitors...
'What holds sway over this country without morals, beliefs, or feelings? Gold and pleasure.' Sexual attraction, artistic insight, and the often ironic relationship between them is the dominant theme in the three short works collected in this volume. In Sarrasine an...
'Who possesses me will possess all things, But his life will belong to me...' Raphael de Valentin, a young aristocrat, has lost all his money in the gaming parlours of the Palais Royal in Paris, and contemplates ending his life by throwing himself into the Seine. He...
Cousin Bette (1846) is considered to be Balzac's last great novel, and a key work in his Human Comedy. Set in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, it is a complex tale of the devastating effect of violent jealousy and sexual passion. Against a meticulously detailed...
À l’insu de tous, le peintre Servin cache, dans le débarras de son atelier, un officier de la Garde impériale blessé à Waterloo et recherché par la police pour avoir aidé Napoléon à reprendre le pouvoir pendant les Cent-Jours. Or l’élève favorite du peintre, Ginevra...
Au pied de la montagne Sainte-Geneviève à Paris, au détour de rues obscures se trouve la Maison Vauquer, "pension bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres". Loin des faubourgs nobles et bourgeois, elle abrite toutes les formes de la misère. S’y côtoient retraités, étudiants...
Au lendemain de l’exécution de Louis XVI, par une nuit de neige et de brouillard dans un Paris désert tétanisé par la Terreur, un homme entreprend la filature d’une vieille dame qui le mène dans un quartier excentré et misérable… Narrant la rencontre secrète d’un trio...
« Vous avez signé le pacte, tout est dit. Maintenant vos volontés seront scrupuleusement satisfaites, mais aux dépens de votre vie. Le cercle de vos jours, figuré par cette Peau, se resserrera suivant la force et le nombre de vos souhaits, depuis le plus léger jusqu’au...
Fier cavalier des armées de Napoléon, le colonel Chabert est déclaré mort… mais reparaît à Paris des années plus tard. Constatant que sa maison a été démolie et que sa femme s’est remariée, Chabert demande à l’avocat Derville de l’aider à recouvrer son nom et sa...
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