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Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac
Category: Fiction
French offices a gutter-jumper-a messenger in fact-who at this moment was eating a piece of dry bread with a hearty appetite. He pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it gleefully through the open pane of the window against which he was leaning. The pellet, well aimed, rebounded ...Show more
Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac; Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Created by)
Category: Classics
Bette, a poor relation of the beautiful Adeline, nurses a terrible grudge against her cousin's family, on whom she depends. That family is slowly being ruined by the uncontrollable sexual appetites of Adeline's husband, Baron Hulot-and it is this weakness that will give the cunning Cousin Bette an oppor ...Show more
Droll Stories - Selected Tales by Honoré de Balzac
Category: Fiction | Series: Dover Thrift Editions Ser.
These choice selections from Honor de Balzac's Droll Stories offer a lively and lusty portrait of sixteenth-century French life and manners. Told in the tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Rabelais, they allegedly originated in manuscripts from the abbeys of Touraine. Originally published in three sets ...Show more
Eugenie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
Category: Classics
The early 19th century is the setting for Honore de Balzac's book "Eugenie Grandet," which takes place in the French town of Saumur. The Grandet family, who are both affluent and exceedingly thrifty, is the focus of the narrative. Felix Grandet, the family patriarch, was formerly a cooper who amassed we ...Show more
Eugenie Grandet by Honoré De Balzac
Category: Classics | Series: The\Human Comedy Ser.
In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur lives the miser Grandet with his wife and daughter, Eugenie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugenie's desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with h ...Show more
History of the Thirteen by Honoré De Balzac
Category: Classics
Passionate and perceptive, the three short novels that make up Balzac's History of the Thirteen are concerned in part with the activities of a rich, powerful, sinister and unscrupulous secret society in nineteenth-century France. While the deeds of 'The Thirteen' remain frequently in the background, how ...Show more
Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac; Ellen Marriage (Translator)
Category: Classics | Series: Everyman's Library Classics Ser.
Honor de Balzac's great theme was money, and in his best-loved novel, Old Goriot, he explored its uses and abuses with the particularity of a poet. A shabby Parisian boarding house in 1819 is the setting where his colorful characters collide. These include an elderly retired merchant called Old Goriot, ...Show more
Old Man Goriot by Honoré De Balzac
Category: Classics | Series: Penguin Classics
'So many mysteries in one boarding house!' 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 ...Show more
Selected Short Stories by Honoré De Balzac
Category: Fiction | Series: Classics Ser.
One of the greatest French novelists, Balzac was also an accomplished writer of shorter fiction. This volume includes twelve of his finest short stories many of which feature characters from his epic series of novels the Comedie Humaine. Compelling tales of acute social and psychological insight, they f ...Show more
The Lily in the Valley by Honoré de Balzac; Peter Bush (Translator); Geoffrey O'Brien (Introduction by)
Category: Fiction
A new translation of one of Balzac's finest novels, this tale of misguided passion centers on a young aristocrat who falls into a cloaked, coded entanglement with an older countess--a relationship that is upended when he becomes involved with a new lover. A story of baffled and irrepressible desire, Ba ...Show more
Ursule Mirouet by Honoré De Balzac
Category: Classics
In 1842, eight years before his death, Balzac described Ursule Mirouet as the masterpiece of all the studies of human society that he had written; he regarded the book as 'a remarkable tour de force'. An essentially simple tale about the struggle and triumph of innocence reviled, Ursule Mirouet is chara ...Show more
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