Resultaten voor 'honor de balzac'

1. Stendhal
2. Honoré de Balzac
3. C K (Charles Kenne Scott-Moncrieff

The Charterhouse of Parma

1. Honoré de Balzac

Autre étude de femme

1. Honoré , de Balzac

Lost Illusions

In the glittering salons of Paris, ambition comes at a terrible price. Lucien de Rubempré is a beautiful, talented young poet from the provinces with dreams of literary glory. Arriving in Paris with nothing but his genius and his illusions, he enters a world where art is commerce, journalism is warfare, and integrity is the first casualty of success. As Lucien navigates the treacherous worlds of publishing and high society, he discovers that talent alone will never be enough. To rise, he must compromise-his principles, his friendships, and ultimately himself. In the salons of the aristocracy and the backrooms of newspapers, every alliance is a calculation, every review is for sale, and every triumph conceals a betrayal. Balzac's devastating masterpiece exposes the machinery of fame and the corruption of genius in a society where everything-and everyone-has a price. A timeless portrait of ambition, disillusionment, and the seductions of success, Lost Illusions remains startlingly relevant to our own age of influencers, media manipulation, and the commodification of art. "One of the greatest novels ever written." -Oscar Wilde

1. Honoré , de Balzac

The Balzac Collection - Volume 7

Pierrette Lorrain is a child, an orphan, sent to live with cousins she has never met in the provincial town of Provins. The Rogrons are former shopkeepers newly arrived at modest prosperity and desperate for social respectability. What Pierrette provides them, from the first day, is an unpaid servant. What Provins provides the Rogrons is the political protection of a town whose ultra-royalist establishment prefers not to examine too closely what is happening in the Rogron household. By the time anyone looks closely enough, it is too late. Dinah de la Baudraye is the most intelligent person in Sancerre and has been for years - she runs the town's best salon, inspires its leading citizens, and is married to a man of no cultivation whatsoever. When the Parisian journalist Lousteau arrives and recognizes her quality, she follows him to Paris, discovers what Parisian literary life actually consists of, and learns that being recognized is not the same as being valued. The narrator of Facino Cane has a gift: the ability, through sustained imaginative attention, to inhabit the inner life of the people he observes so completely that their history becomes briefly available to him. At a wedding dance in a poor Parisian quarter, he meets an old blind musician who was once a Venetian nobleman - who murdered a man, was imprisoned in the Leads, found a treasure hidden in the prison's foundations, escaped at the cost of his sight, and has spent the decades since organizing his entire existence around the possibility of return. This seventh volume of the Balzac Collection brings together Pierrette, The Muse of the Department, and Facino Cane - three works from La Comédie humaine in which the gap between what a life appears to be and what it actually contains is the subject, and Balzac's refusal to look away from that gap is the method. Precise, unsparing, and - in the case of Pierrette - devastating.

1. Honoré , de Balzac

The Balzac Collection - Volume 2

At a grand ball in 1809, two men wager on seducing a mysterious young woman. She is, it will emerge, the virtuous wife of a man they both know. Balzac disposes of their confidence in a few pages, with the precision and the economy of a writer who understands that comedy depends entirely on the gap between what people believe about themselves and what they actually are. In the four works that follow, the same gap opens under higher pressure. Thaddée Paz -- Polish exile, devoted friend, and a man who has loved his friend's wife in silence for years -- constructs an elaborate fiction of a mistress who does not exist, to explain why he cannot love the woman he loves. The fiction holds until it cannot, and Paz's response to its collapse is the completion of the sacrifice he began: he disappears. Albert Savarus publishes a novella that is, for anyone with the key, the thinly encoded story of his own love -- and a twenty-year-old woman in a provincial town, who has fixed on him with the intensity of someone who has never before had an object for her feelings, uses the knowledge to intercept his correspondence, destroy his love, and drive him into a monastery. Marie de Vandenesse, seeking the passion her stable marriage has never provided, becomes entangled with an unstable writer and attempts a secret rescue of his finances that her husband discovers -- and discovers, in her husband's response, something she has been prepared by her entire formation to overlook. This second volume of the Balzac Collection draws from the Scènes de la vie privée and the Scènes de la vie parisienne to present five works united by a single preoccupation: the social world runs on managed surfaces and concealed interiors, and the moment when the concealment fails -- through misdirected letters, intercepted correspondence, discovered secrets, sacrifices made visible -- is the moment that reveals what is actually there beneath the performance. Balzac at his most formally varied -- and his most precise about the costs of the lives his society made necessary.

1. Honoré , de Balzac

The Balzac Collection - Volume 3

Madame de Beauséant retreated to Normandy after Paris had finished with her -- after the man she loved left her for a wealthier marriage and the whole of society attended her final ball knowing what it signified. In her provincial retreat, a young man falls in love with her, and she allows it, knowing what she knows. He eventually leaves to make the marriage his position requires. She does not survive the second time. These are the coordinates of Balzac's La Comédie humaine at its most searching: private arrangements, irreversible consequences, and the precise measurement of what the social world costs the people it processes. The five works that accompany it in this third collection move through related territory from different angles. A dying woman spends her last months in a house above the Loire, loving her sons with the absolute clarity of someone who knows exactly how much time remains. A carriage journey ends in a death, and the message to be delivered afterward reveals a life its owner had not fully described. The moneylender Gobseck -- ancient, philosophically rigorous, the master of the universal solvent -- dies surrounded by rotting treasures he could never bring himself to liquidate. An evening of Parisian salon conversation yields a moral dilemma, told in passing, that contains more of Balzac's world than most novels of twice the length. And Paul de Manerville signs a marriage contract whose clauses have been constructed, with great skill and complete ruthlessness, by the mother of the woman he loves -- and discovers, over the years that follow, exactly what he agreed to. This third volume of the Balzac Collection draws from the Scènes de la vie privée -- the Scenes of Private Life -- to present six works in which the private and the social are not separate territories but the same territory seen from different distances, and in which the consequences of social arrangements are paid, as they always are, in the currency of specific and irreversible human experience. Balzac at his most precise -- and most unsparing.