Oeuvres complètes: 101 titres La Comédie humaine

by Honoré de Balzac

Cette édition a été saluée d'une mention spéciale dans le journal 20 Minutes (article du 10 juillet 2012) pour son classement dans le TOP 10 de l’été.

Cette édition originale regroupe l'intégrale de la Comédie Humaine et une partie des oeuvres de jeunesse et autres annexes. Elle a été spécialement conçue pour une lecture sur Kindle.
Elle est composée de 101 titres! :

- SCÈNES DE LA VIE PRIVEE :
La Maison du chat-qui-pelote • Le Bal de Sceaux • Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées • La Bourse • Modeste Mignon • Un début dans la vie • Albert Savarus • La Vendetta • Une double famille • La Paix du ménage • Madame Firmiani • Étude de femme • La Fausse Maîtresse • Une fille d'Ève • Le Message • La Grande Bretèche • La Grenadière • La Femme abandonnée • Honorine • Béatrix • Gobseck • La Femme de trente ans • Le Père Goriot • Le Colonel Chabert • La Messe de l'athée • L'Interdiction • Le Contrat de mariage • Autre étude de femme

- SCÈNES DE LA VIE DE PROVINCE :
Ursule Mirouët • Eugénie Grandet • Pierrette • Le Curé de Tours • La Rabouilleuse • L'Illustre Gaudissart • La Muse du département • La Vieille Fille • Le Cabinet des Antiques • Illusions perdues • Les Deux Poètes • Un grand homme de province à Paris • Ève et David

- SCÈNES DE LA VIE PARISIENNE :
Histoire des Treize • Ferragus • La Duchesse de Langeais • La Fille aux yeux d'or • César Birotteau • La Maison Nucingen • Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes • Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan • Facino Cane • Sarrasine • Pierre Grassou • La Cousine Bette • Le Cousin Pons • Un homme d'affaires • Un prince de la bohème • Gaudissart II • Les Employés ou la Femme supérieure • Les Comédiens sans le savoir • Les Petits Bourgeois • L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine

- SCÈNES DE LA VIE POLITIQUE :
Un épisode sous la Terreur • Une ténébreuse affaire • Le Député d'Arcis • Z. Marcas

- SCÈNES DE LA VIE MILITAIRE :
Les Chouans • Une passion dans le désert

- SCÈNES DE LA VIE DE CAMPAGNE :
Le Médecin de campagne • Le Curé de village • Le Lys dans la vallée

- ETUDES PHILOSOPHIQUES :
La Peau de chagrin • Jésus-Christ en Flandre • Melmoth réconcilié • Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu • Gambara • Massimilla Doni • La Recherche de l'absolu • L'Enfant maudit • Adieu • Les Marana • Le Réquisitionnaire • El Verdugo • Un drame au bord de la mer • Maître Cornélius • L'Auberge rouge • Sur Catherine de Médicis • L'Élixir de longue vie • Les Proscrits • Louis Lambert • Séraphîta

- ETUDES ANALYTIQUES :
Physiologie du mariage • Petites Misères de la vie conjugale • Pathologie de la vie sociale • Traité de la vie élégante • Théorie de la démarche • Traité des excitants modernes

- CONTES et OEUVRES DE JEUNESSE:
Les contes bruns • Contes drolatiques • Code des gens honnetes • Le not

Genres: Classics, Fiction, France, French Literature

16928 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1836

About the author

French writer Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac), a founder of the realist school of fiction, portrayed the panorama of society in a body of works, known collectively as La comédie humaine .

Honoré de Balzac authored 19th-century novels and plays. After the fall of Napoléon in 1815, his magnum opus, a sequence of almost a hundred novels and plays, entitled, presents life in the years.

Due to keen observation of fine detail and unfiltered representation, European literature regards Balzac. He features renowned multifaceted, even complex, morally ambiguous, full lesser characters. Character well imbues inanimate objects; the city of Paris, a backdrop, takes on many qualities. He influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles John Huffam Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Jack Kerouac as well as important philosophers, such as Friedrich Engels. Many works of Balzac, made into films, continue to inspire.

An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac adapted with trouble to the teaching style of his grammar. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. Balzac finished, and people then apprenticed him as a legal clerk, but after wearying of banal routine, he turned his back on law. He attempted a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician before and during his career. He failed in these efforts From his own experience, he reflects life difficulties and includes scenes.

Possibly due to his intense schedule and from health problems, Balzac suffered throughout his life. Financial and personal drama often strained his relationship with his family, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, he married Ewelina Hańska, his longtime paramour; five months later, he passed away.

Reviews

[BAM IS BACK! · Rating 2 out of 5]

11/19 sooo GOOD NEWS! As I am only reading the shorter stories I actually have about 400 ish pages remaining. The ebook I’m using is just about everything he wrote, but I was not planning to reread anything I had already read; nor was I going to read the books, or any nonfiction pieces or any bio type writings. Those 400 pages consist of the remainder of my current story, which is a bit enjoyable, and one other story (I think). That is such a cheerful, refreshing bit of news. I am ready for this to be over.

11/12/23 well I suppose I should see how much I can make myself read before the end of the year since this is how my year started. Considering what I had read before opening this copy, I’ve made decent progress, I just can’t update the % very well. That’s maths and my maths doesn’t maths.


4/23. This book is still haunting and taunting me. Damn you Balzac! I just finished one of the short stories and I’m almost finished with the second AND I AM STILL AT 40% what the F I’m no quitter Balzac. You better get your game on, because I will defeat you by the end of this year or I’ll delete your damn book

BON JOUR de Balzac! Yes t'is I I have recharged my batteries for a second go at your ridiculous omnibus. I do not know if I'm happy about this yet, but I'm certainly tired of looking at you on my shelf. So here it goes!

1/1923 I’m getting so used to seeing this book on my currently reading shelf I might just leave it there forever. That way I can compare the length of all of the other books I read in 2023 and feel like a lying cheat because that’s the only way I’ll ever finish this. I can now compare it to my Wordsworth book on that shelf. I believe they have about the same amount of pages to read now.

10/30 39%! 39! 39% people I’m at 39% and it’s only the end of October! 2022 I’d better put that year in as I expect to finish in 2034. In my coffin.
I’ll read it to Vlad. I hear he likes being invited to book clubs. He can come right in and join me. Invitation has been offered.

10/5 I’m finally reaching some of the short stories and novellas I’ve already read. I just jumped to 32%!! I mean I have been reading this since January so that’s great progress only another 5,000 pages to go. That’s like book pocket change. No wrinkles or grey hairs to blame on this book yet. I do think I’m going to write Honore a fan letter and ask him what the hell was he thinking when he wrote all of these damn stories. I think he was on meth.

6/13 I really do not want to read this anymore. I started this at the end of January, it’s been practically 6 months HALF A YEAR and I’m still at 25%. This is total madness. I read from this collection every damn day. It’s lost its appeal. Someone may have to bury me with a copy of this book, as I might need something to read on the bus that’s driving my friends and I to the beach of all beaches. I should have taken before and after pics of myself so that I could visualize how badly I’ve aged because of this stupid book.


1/25 i don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time reading something and still be at 1%. OMG! I’m still at 1%. I must say I’m enjoying this much more than Lost Time by Proust.

1/26 OMG! This is hilarious! I’m still at 1% bahahaha

2/5 so it appears that I’m only moving 1% a week? That’s seems odd, but that’s the statistic so far. If that’s the case I’ll finish this next year…yeah EDIT 11/19/2023: c’est finis it took almost a year and a half! And that was just the shortish stories that I had never read. But I can now divorce de Balzac.

2/20 I’m now at 5%. FIVE PERCENT! So I know I was worried about Chekhov. And then there was the Proust. But I think de Balzac with be the death of me. Someone is going to find me dead in my bed holding my IPAD and I’ll still be at 5%.

Ok so if I read all of this it will be the largest published work I’ve ever taken on; it’s opening up with a page count of over 21,000 pages. I’ve already read maybe 25%? Just not in order (past reads)I honestly have no idea how long this will take me. For those of you who have asked me you know how I will approach this. For those of you who are not in the know I fit these monstrous omnibuses in pages here and there while I spend more time on my shorter books (shorter being anything 400 or less ish) so this may take me several months. Let’s see if I can get this read by spring showers bringing may flowers

4/2 well so far I've read around 27 of the stories just 3,789 to go lol I'm using two different versions. I have a Delphi classics ebook and I have an abridged NYBR version. Neither has the stories in numerical order for some reason. Funny thing is IM STILL ONLY 10% through god that makes me laugh so hard 10/18 UPDATE- I have been able to locate some of the stories on LibriVox! Woo hoo speed at 2lol

4/4 why am I doing this to myself? All of the stories are whimsical for the most part. There has been one or two that struck a nerve, but most are average meh 😑 I changed the font so more words fit on the page because psychologically I feel like I’m reading it more quickly. I may have to take a break considering IM STILL AT TEN PERCENT.this book is an OUBLIETTE

4/11 Oooooooooo I jumped TWO % tonight! Celebrate good times come on! 12% people! I’ll be finished with this before you know it. Either that or I’m going to throw my iPad against the wall. Either really would feel fulfilling at this point.

4/30 16 percent everyone! It’s taken four months, but obviously, I must be on a role now! de Balzac you are the devil and we are going to have a conversation about this after I’ve driven the bus down there and find you

5/17 YYAAAAASSSSS IVE MADE IT TO PROVINCIAL LIFE ! I’m still only about 20% read but I’ve read section one of my omnibus
Is that a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel? Or am I still viewing the lunar eclipse?

5/19 I decided I’m definitely stopping at the philosophical studies. In my copy though that’s only about 3,000 pages less than the total. I also noticed that a few of the stories are duplicated in other sections? So there’s that! I must be on a roll because I read from this my entire off work week and jumped an entire 2% people! See that’s what determination gets you! Steadfastness right here y’all

Please forgive any typos I never proofread

[Rosa St.Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I consider The Human Comedy to be one of the best novels ever written. In his assorment of stories, Balzac's study of human nature in pre-Freud times is a detailed analyses of how greed, lust, corruption can turn the most naive and innocent to fall into the drain of temptation. His creation of the characters who inhabit the pages within The Human Comedy, is a map from which the readers gain experience that would take years of in-life-training to learn otherwise. His characters are so real that they can be found in any group of persons. He writes with such realism and depth that only a slate of other writers can claim the same. The most prolific among those who followed his path are Émile Zola, Jack Kerouac and Charles Dickens.

Even as a child, he loved reading but did not like the ways of grammar school. He liked to go his own way. Sadly, this much acclaimed author, who was copied by many, did not live too long. he died at 51, after being married to the love of his life for only 5 months.

I rate this book 5 stars. I read this book in my teens, and then again while in college, but recently reread it because of its vast wealth of words.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are literary projects that aspire to describe a society, and then there is Honoré de Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Conceived in the early 1840s and published in various forms between 1842 and 1848, Balzac’s great cycle is not merely a collection of novels and stories but an attempt to construct an entire fictional society: its families, professions, fortunes, ambitions, marriages, crimes, houses, streets, salons, newspapers, banks, courts and bedrooms. The result is one of the most extraordinary experiments in the history of the novel.

The scale is intimidating. Balzac planned 137 works for the project, although 46 were never completed; the surviving Comédie humaine consists of roughly ninety linked novels, novellas and stories. The BnF records Balzac’s intended three-part architecture: Études de mœurs (Studies of Manners), Études philosophiques (Philosophical Studies) and Études analytiques (Analytical Studies). The first of these contains the great social panoramas—private, provincial, Parisian, political, military and country life—while the latter two move towards questions of desire, knowledge, morality, marriage and the philosophical forces underlying human behaviour.

But statistics scarcely convey what makes the undertaking remarkable. The real achievement lies in Balzac's decision to make his fiction interconnected.

Characters return from one book to another, sometimes as protagonists, sometimes as minor figures, sometimes merely as names mentioned in conversation. Rastignac, Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempré, among many others, acquire biographies that extend beyond the boundaries of any single novel. The Maison de Balzac describes this as the creation of an imaginary biographical space in which a character cannot necessarily be understood from one novel alone. Rastignac's life, for instance, is distributed across several works and periods.

This technique changes the experience of reading. A minor character encountered in one story may suddenly reappear years later as a banker, politician, criminal or ruined aristocrat. Paris itself begins to feel less like a setting than a vast machine through which people circulate. The reader gradually develops the strange sensation of knowing these people independently of the particular story being told. Balzac's world acquires something resembling the continuity of real life: people have pasts before they enter a novel and futures after they leave it.

The architecture of society

The classification of The Human Comedy is more than a publishing convenience. Balzac wanted his fiction to operate almost like a social science. The Études de mœurs investigate society through different environments and social situations; the Études philosophiques push towards the psychological and metaphysical consequences of human passions; the Études analytiques attempt something closer to an examination of the principles governing social and private life. The BnF's catalogue preserves this three-part conception.

This is why The Human Comedy is simultaneously a collection of novels and something much stranger: a system.

Balzac was attempting to discover the laws beneath apparently chaotic human behaviour. His characters are driven by recurring forces—money, sexual desire, ambition, vanity, social position, family obligation and the longing for recognition. Modern scholarship has consequently emphasised that Balzac's realism is not simply a matter of recording what he observed. Armine Kotin Mortimer, for example, describes love and money as the “Prime Movers” of Balzac's fictional universe and stresses the elaborate rhetorical and structural techniques through which he creates the impression of reality.

This distinction is crucial. Balzac is not a camera.

He is an architect.

Money is the great Balzacian force

If one idea dominates The Human Comedy, it is the extraordinary power of money to transform human relationships.

Balzac understood that post-Revolutionary France was becoming a society in which inherited rank increasingly had to compete with acquired wealth. Aristocrats could lose everything; provincial youths could rise in Paris; obscure financiers could acquire enormous power; marriage could become a financial alliance; sexual relationships could become transactions; friendships could collapse when money entered the room.

This is why Balzac's novels can feel surprisingly modern.

In Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet, Cousin Bette, Cousin Pons, Lost Illusions and The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, money is never merely background. It structures consciousness. Characters calculate, speculate, conceal, inherit, borrow, invest and manipulate. A fortune can alter someone's posture, vocabulary, clothes and friends almost overnight.

Balzac's realism therefore has an economic dimension. A person's social identity is inseparable from what he or she owns, owes or hopes to obtain.

Scholarship on Balzac has repeatedly identified money and power as central organising forces of the cycle. One study of Balzac and social power describes money and power as the “central protagonists” of La Comédie humaine, surrounded by bankers, speculators, usurers, financiers, impoverished aristocrats and ambitious careerists.

Marriage receives similar treatment. Balzac is often much less interested in the romantic ideal of marriage than in its economic and social consequences. Who brings the dowry? Who inherits? What family connections become available? What happens to a woman's property? What does an aristocratic name actually mean when the family is bankrupt?

His marriages are frequently negotiations disguised as romances.

That can make his novels bleak, but it also gives them extraordinary sociological force.

Paris as a machine for producing ambition

The greatest geographical invention of The Human Comedy is Paris.

For Balzac, Paris is not simply a city. It is a hierarchy, a marketplace and a theatre of ambition. Provincial characters enter it hoping to become someone else. Newspapers manufacture reputations; salons distribute influence; financiers create fortunes; courtesans convert sexuality into social capital; lawyers and politicians manipulate information; aristocrats attempt to preserve an increasingly precarious position.

The contrast between Paris and the provinces is therefore fundamental. Paris promises transformation, but the price of admission is enormous.

This is particularly evident in the careers of Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempré. Both arrive with aspirations and discover that talent alone is insufficient. They must learn the codes of a society in which appearance, connections and money can matter more than merit.

Balzac's great subject is consequently social mobility—and its moral cost.

Modern criticism has identified precisely this tension as one of his major contributions to the representation of modernity: the movement from an older social order towards a modern society defined by shifting relations among wealth, power, identity and social mobility.

Realism—or something more artificial?

It is tempting to call Balzac simply “the great realist” and leave the matter there. But this risks misunderstanding what makes his realism distinctive.

The Maison de Balzac makes an important point: Balzac does not merely reproduce reality. His realism emerges from the way material details, social structures and intimate psychology are integrated into the fiction.

This is why he can spend an extraordinary amount of time describing a room.

A Balzacian interior is rarely just decoration. The furniture, wallpaper, clothing, neighbourhood and condition of a building tell us about its inhabitants. Poverty leaves marks on objects. Wealth announces itself through surfaces. Social decline can be read in the condition of a staircase or the fading upholstery of a salon.

The result can be astonishingly vivid.

It can also be exhausting.

This is probably the principal obstacle for the modern reader. Balzac's descriptive passages can interrupt a story just when the reader wants to know what happens next. Legal arrangements, financial calculations, genealogies and architectural details may occupy pages that a contemporary novelist might compress into a paragraph.

Nicholas Lezard, reviewing a selection of Balzac for The Guardian, makes precisely this point: the scale of the Comédie humaine can be daunting, and its longer works can contain enormous digressions. Yet he also argues that the shorter fiction offers an elegant way into Balzac's distinctive pleasures.

The apparent excess, however, is part of the artistic method. Balzac wants the reader to understand that people are produced by environments. The room is part of the character; the neighbourhood is part of the room; the neighbourhood is part of the social system.

Everything connects.

The extraordinary power of the shorter works

One of the pleasures of reading the complete cycle is discovering that the famous novels are not necessarily the only—or even always the best—examples of Balzac's art.

Gobseck, Sarrasine, The Duchesse de Langeais, Facino Cane, Adieu, The Red Inn and A Passion in the Desert demonstrate how concentrated Balzac could become when freed from the enormous social panoramas of the longer novels.

The New York Review Books selection of Balzac's shorter fiction is particularly revealing because it places stories such as Sarrasine, Gobseck and The Duchesse de Langeais alongside one another. Its editorial introduction emphasises the recurrence of Balzac's obsessions with storytelling, desire, crime, madness and illicit passion.

These works can be almost feverish.

In Sarrasine, sexual desire, artistic idealism, deception and gender become entangled in a story whose apparent simplicity conceals extraordinary psychological instability. Gobseck transforms the miser into something more than a comic figure: he becomes an embodiment of a society in which money has acquired an almost metaphysical power. The Duchesse de Langeais turns aristocratic pride and frustrated desire into a miniature tragedy.

The short fiction also reveals Balzac's willingness to move beyond conventional realism. There are stories of the supernatural, the grotesque, the mystical and the fantastical. The Human Comedy is therefore less stylistically uniform than its reputation suggests.

Balzac's characters: caricatures that become human

Balzac's characters are sometimes criticised for being types rather than psychologically subtle individuals.

There is truth in this criticism.

He loves the miser, the ambitious provincial, the corrupt journalist, the cynical financier, the fallen aristocrat, the calculating wife, the devoted mother, the beautiful courtesan, the unscrupulous lawyer. At first glance, these figures can seem almost schematic.

Yet Balzac possesses a remarkable ability to make the type become an individual.

Grandet is not merely “the miser”. Vautrin is not merely “the criminal”. Rastignac is not merely “the ambitious young man”. Their defining traits become histories. Their obsessions acquire emotional consequences. Their apparent consistency is repeatedly complicated by moments of tenderness, cowardice, generosity, cruelty or self-deception.

This is another consequence of the recurring-character system. We encounter characters under different circumstances, and therefore see different sides of them.

The technique anticipates something fundamental in the modern novel: the idea that a person is too large to be contained by a single narrative.

The darker side of the achievement

Yet The Human Comedy is not a flawless monument.

Balzac can be repetitive. Certain social mechanisms recur so frequently that the reader sometimes feels he has been shown the same machine with different occupants. The explanatory impulse can become excessive. His narrators occasionally tell us what we ought to think when the action itself has already made the point.

His women are particularly complicated territory for modern readers. Balzac could depict female intelligence, ambition, sexuality and suffering with extraordinary force, but his representations are also shaped by the gender assumptions of nineteenth-century France. Women are frequently judged according to marriage, sexual reputation, beauty and economic dependence in ways that reveal both Balzac's critical insight and his historical limitations.

Nor should the Comédie humaine be treated as a straightforward documentary record of French society. Its realism is constructed, selective and sometimes fantastical. The Maison de Balzac's discussion of his realism is valuable precisely because it warns against reducing him to the cliché “Balzac = realism.”

His France is a fictional France—one whose extraordinary coherence is itself an artistic invention.

Reading the whole thing

The question eventually becomes practical: should anyone actually read the entire Human Comedy?

Yes—but not necessarily in the way one reads a conventional novel.

Reading the complete cycle from beginning to end can become an exercise in endurance if approached as a single continuous narrative. Balzac himself did not write it as one continuous novel. It is better understood as a constellation.

Read Père Goriot, then Lost Illusions. Follow Rastignac. Follow Vautrin. Move from Paris to the provinces and back again. Read Eugénie Grandet beside Cousin Bette. Put Gobseck next to Eugénie Grandet and watch two very different versions of money emerge. Read Sarrasine and The Duchesse de Langeais to experience the compressed, almost Gothic Balzac. Return to Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans and observe how characters who once seemed secondary have become central.

Gradually, the books begin to illuminate one another.

That is when the scale ceases to be merely intimidating and becomes meaningful.

The final judgement

The greatness of The Human Comedy lies less in the claim that Balzac successfully reproduced nineteenth-century France than in the fact that he invented a convincing literary model of how a society works.

People want things. Things cost money. Money creates relationships. Relationships create obligations. Obligations generate secrets. Secrets create opportunities. Opportunities produce ambition. Ambition produces betrayal. And the whole mechanism starts again.

That is Balzac's great subject.

His world is material, competitive and often brutal, but it is also extraordinarily alive. He understood that society is not an abstraction: it exists in bedrooms, bank accounts, dining rooms, wills, debts, clothes, love affairs and conversations. The grandeur of The Human Comedy comes from bringing all these apparently insignificant details into a single imaginative system.

The achievement is uneven, excessive and sometimes exhausting. Some books are masterpieces; others feel like laboratories in which Balzac is testing an idea that he has not quite learned how to control. Some pages are breathtaking; others seem determined to explain every chair in the room before allowing the characters to speak.

But the very excess is part of the experience.

Balzac wanted to rival the civil registry, to create on paper a society whose inhabitants could be followed across time. In that ambition he came remarkably close to creating something unprecedented: not simply a collection of novels, but a fictional civilisation.

Nearly two centuries later, the most astonishing thing about The Human Comedy is therefore not that it is enormous.

It is that it is alive.

And once one has spent enough time inside it, Paris in the nineteenth century no longer feels like history. It feels like somewhere one has lived.

Verdict: An uneven but monumental achievement—at once novel, social anatomy, character encyclopedia and fictional universe. Its digressions demand patience, but the rewards are cumulative. Read individually, many of the works are excellent; read together, they become something much stranger and more ambitious: one of the first great attempts to make an entire society into a work of fiction.

[Joao Baptista · Rating 5 out of 5]

As minhas impressões sobre a leitura deste ciclo integral:

https://epulata.com/2019/07/28/livros-2/

[Lyna Torche · Rating 4 out of 5]

pelo le moment de la dent m’a trauma de 1 et de deux pourquoi j’avais autant aimer au collège

[Graziano · Rating 4 out of 5]

LA VENDETTA (***)

Esclusivamente romanticismo.



UNA DOPPIA FAMIGLIA (***)



LA FALSA AMANTE (****)

“Con una donna, bisogna sempre trarre vantaggio da un segreto: essa ve n’è grata...”

(168)



IL MESSAGGIO (**)



LA DONNA ABBANDONATA (****)

“La viscontessa viveva ignorando completamente le circonvoluzioni che tracciava intorno a lei M. de Nueil, il cui amore aumentava con il crescere degli ostacoli da superare, i quali conferivano alla sua amante improvvisata le attrattive che possiede ciò che è lontano.”

(244-5)



“La donna è così riconoscente quando incontra un uomo sensibile ai capricci così logici del suo cuore, che capisca le apparenti contraddizioni della sua mente, i fugaci pudori, per le sue sensazioni ora timide, ora ardite, strano miscuglio di civetteria e di ingenuità!”

(251)



L’INTERDIZIONE (****)

“La tua donna affettuosa non porta a nulla, una donna di mondo porta a tutto, è il diamante con cui un uomo taglia tutti i vetri, quando lui non ha la chiave d’oro che apre tutte le porte.”

(287)



L’ILLUSTRE GAUDISSART (****)

I SEGRETI DELLA PRINCIPESSA DI CADIGNAN (***)

"... perché un'amicizia sincera e durevole tra donne dev'essere cementata con qualche piccolo misfatto."
(30)

SARRASINE (***)

"Parlar di pericoli a un innamorato non è forse proporgli dei piaceri?"
(99)

PIERRE GRASSOU (**)

UN EPISODIO DURANTE IL TERRORE (**)

UNA PASSIONE NEL DESERTO (***)

GESU' CRISTO IN FIANDRA (**)

IL CAPOLAVORO SCONOSCIUTO (***)

"Ogni figura è un mondo, un ritratto il cui modello è apparso in una visione sublime, bagnato di luce, designato da una voce interiore, spogliato da un dito celeste che ha mostrato, nel passato di tutta una vita, le fonti dell'espressione."
(217)

IL FIGLIO MALEDETTO (****)

"Quando abbiamo fatto qualche esperienza nella vita, conosciamo il segreto influsso che i luoghi esercitano sul nostro animo."
(248)

"La laboriosa poesia le cui ricche meditazioni ci fanno percorrere come botanici i vasti campi del pensiero, la feconda comparazione delle idee umane, l'esaltazione che ci procura il perfetto intendimento delle opere del genio, erano divenute le inesauribili e tranquille felicità della sua vita di sogno e solitudine." (Étienne)
(288)

ADDIO (****)

LE MARANA (****)

"L'amore crea nella donna una donna nuova, l'indomani, quella di ieri non esiste più."
(436)

LA RECLUTA (****)

"Vivamente commosso da quella abnegazione così naturale nelle donne, e tuttavia per noi sempre motivo di commozione, perché tutti gli uomini sono lusingati dai sacrifici che una di loro fa per un uomo..."
(476)

EL VERDUGO (**)

LA LOCANDA ROSSA (**)

[Kieffer Jérôme · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinaire, à lire absolument