Balzac

If the Mediterranean, the venerable (and sometimes atrociously ill- tempered) nurse of all navigators, was to rock my youth, the providing of the cradle necessary for that 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 CAPE ET D'EPEE.

You know I have always been intensely interested in Balzac, who never shrank from the reality, and whose almost LURID pictures of Parisian life have often haunted me in my wanderings through the old wicked- looking streets on the other side of the river.

"You look like Balzac's `FEMME PEINTE PAR ELLE-NENE'," he said, as he fanned her with one hand and held her coffee cup in the other.

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.

He lent them willingly; and Philip became acquainted with Flaubert and Balzac, with Verlaine, Heredia, and Villiers de l'Isle Adam.

Gay-Lussac the chemist, Laplace the astronomer, Larrey the surgeon, de Suze the advocate, are here, and with them are Talma, Bellini, Rubini; de Balzac, Beaumarchais, Beranger; Moliere and Lafontaine, and scores of other men whose names and whose worthy labors are as familiar in the remote by-places of civilization as are the historic deeds of the kings and princes that sleep in the marble vaults of St.

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.

de Balzac, whose foresight is so remarkably at home in the future.

Quand un bon vin meuble mon estomac, Je suis plus savant que Balzac - Plus sage que Pibrac ; Mon brass seul faisant l'attaque De la nation Coseaque, La mettroit au sac ; De Charon je passerois le lac, En dormant dans son bac ; J'irois au fier Eac, Sans que mon cœur fit tic ni tac, Présenter du tabac.