French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
How many thank-offerings ought we to make to the kind and beneficent spirit that breathes in all things here below! Indeed, the care which nature takes to strip us piece by piece of our raiment, to unclothe the soul by enfeebling gradually our hearing, sight, and sense of touch, in making slower the circulation of our blood, and congealing our humors so as to make us as insensible to the approach of death as we were to the beginnings of life, this maternal care which she lavishes on our frail tabernacle of clay, she also exhibits in regard to the emotions of man, and to the double existence which is created by conjugal love. She first sends us Confidence, which with extended hand and open heart says to us: "Behold, I am thine forever!" Lukewarmness follows, walking with languid tread, turning aside her blonde face with a yawn, like a young widow obliged to listen to the minister of state who is ready to sign for her a pension warrant. Then Indifference comes; she stretches herself on the divan, taking no care to draw down the skirts of her robe which Desire but now lifted so chastely and so eagerly. She casts a glance upon the nuptial bed, with modesty and without shamelessness; and, if she longs for anything, it is for the green fruit that calls up again to life the dulled papillae with which her blase palate is bestrewn. Finally the philosophical Experience of Life presents herself, with careworn and disdainful brow, pointing with her finger to the results, and not the causes of life’s incidents; to the tranquil victory, not to the tempestuous combat. She reckons up the arrearages, with farmers, and calculates the dowry of a child. She materializes everything. By a touch of her wand, life becomes solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid, now it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts, it has received its sentence, ‘twas but mere sensation, a passing paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquility, in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other, and the sluggish organs perform their functions.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
A young man, or an old man, perhaps, has but lately acquired possession of a young girl by a contract duly registered at the Town Hall, before heaven and on the rolls of the estate—a young girl with long hair, limpid black eyes, small feet, dainty tapering fingers, red lips, ivory teeth, and a good figure; tremulous, tempting, white as a lily, laden with all the treasures of loveliness imaginable; her drooping eyelashes resembling the sharp points of a crown; her skin, as fresh as the corolla of a white camelia, tinted with the purple of the darker-hued camelia; on whose clear complexion can be seen the bloom borne by young fruit, and the well-nigh invisible down of the dappled peach, her blue veins spreading a rich warmth over this transparent network; she asks for life, she is ready to give life; she is full of love and joy, of gracefulness and simplicity. She loves her husband, or at least she thinks she loves him.... The lover and the husband has said in his heart, 'These eyes shall see me only, for me alone shall this mouth quiver with love, this soft hand shall bestow the treasures of fleeting pleasure only upon me, this bosom heave but at my voice, but at my will shall this sleeping soul awake; I alone shall run my fingers through these shining tresses, I alone cover this eager, trembling head with dreamy caresses. I will make Death keep watch by my pillow to defend the nuptial-bed from the spoiler; this throne of love shall swim either in the blood of the unwary or in my own. Rest, honour, happiness, paternal bonds, the fate of my children, all he there; I will guard them as a lioness guards her whelps. Woe to him who puts foot in my lair!'
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Here I am ready to make my bow to the world. By way of preparation I have been trying to commit all the follies I could think of before sobering down for my entry.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
The provinces are provinces; they are only ridiculous when they mimic Paris.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Pierrette
A lover teaches a wife all that her husband has concealed from her.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The husband who leaves nothing to desire is a lost man.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
What is a child, monsieur, but the image of two beings, the fruit of two sentiments spontaneously blended?
HONORE DE BALZAC
A Woman of Thirty
I don’t say they love, my dear, but they are forced to lodge somewhere, like other men, and when they haven’t a home of their own they lodge with their mistresses; which may seem to you rather loose, but it is far more agreeable than lodging in a prison.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
We stand between two policies—either to found the State on the basis of the family, or to rest it on individual interest—in other words, between democracy and aristocracy, between free discussion and obedience, between Catholicism and religious indifference. I am among the few who are resolved to oppose what is called the people, and that in the people's true interest. It is not now a question of feudal rights, as fools are told, nor of rank; it is a question of the State and of the existence of France. The country which does not rest on the foundation of paternal authority cannot be stable. That is the foot of the ladder of responsibility and subordination, which has for its summit the King.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Harmony reigns supreme, instead of being the foundation from which the melodic groups of the musical picture stand forth. These discordant combinations, far from moving the listener, arouse in him a feeling analogous to that which he would experience on seeing a rope-dancer hanging to a thread and swaying between life and death. Never does a soothing strain come in to mitigate the fatiguing suspense. It really is as though the composer had had no other object in view than to produce a baroque effect without troubling himself about musical truth or unity, or about the capabilities of human voices which are swamped by this flood of instrumental noise.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
Andrea shot a swift look at Marianna, who was watching him. And he noted the beautiful Italian head, the exquisite proportion and rich coloring that revealed one of those organizations in which every human power is harmoniously balanced, he sounded the gulf that divided this couple, brought together by fate. Well content with the promise he inferred from this dissimilarity between the husband and wife, he made no attempt to control a liking which ought to have raised a barrier between the fair Marianna and himself. He was already conscious of feeling a sort of respectful pity for this man, whose only joy she was, as he understood the dignified and serene acceptance of ill fortune that was expressed in Gambara's mild and melancholy gaze.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
A man whose business it is to cook for all comers can have no political opinions.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
What a scene it was that met our eyes! The room was in frightful disorder; clothes and papers and rags lay tossed about in a confusion horrible to see in the presence of Death; and there, in the midst, stood the Countess in disheveled despair, unable to utter a word, her eyes glittering. The Count had scarcely breathed his last before his wife came in and forced open the drawers and the desk; the carpet was strewn with litter, some of the furniture and boxes were broken, the signs of violence could be seen everywhere. But if her search had at first proved fruitless, there was that in her excitement and attitude which led me to believe that she had found the mysterious documents at last. I glanced at the bed, and professional instinct told me all that had happened. The mattress had been flung contemptuously down by the bedside, and across it, face downwards, lay the body of the Count, like one of the paper envelopes that strewed the carpet—he too was nothing now but an envelope. There was something grotesquely horrible in the attitude of the stiffening rigid limbs.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
In order that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
Fraction does not exist in Nature, where what you call a fragment is a finished whole.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
The bed is the whole of marriage.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage