The Works of Honoré De Balzac: About Catherine De' Medici, Seraphita, and Other Stories
The Works of Honoré De Balzac: About Catherine De' Medici, Seraphita, and Other Stories
Translated by Clara Bell
The Human Comedy stands as one of literature's most audacious undertakings: a panoramic portrait of French society so vast it contains nearly 2,000 living characters across ninety-one works. This collection gathers Balzac's vision of total fictional worlds, where a peasant's ambition matters as much as a banker's downfall. Here you'll find "About Catherine de' Medici," where Balzac reimagines the demonized queen as a shrewd political survivor navigating religious war and royal intrigue with necessary ruthlessness. Then there's "Seraphita," a mystical fever dream of spiritual transformation that shows Balzac chasing something beyond society into the realm of the divine. Between these poles lies everything that made him the architect of the modern novel: razor-sharp dissection of money, sex, power, and the thousand small violences we do to each other in the name of advancement. This is the work that taught Zola how to build a world, that showed Faulkner how to interlock destinies, that proved the novel could be an encyclopedia of human experience. It demands patience and rewards it endlessly.
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“I do not share the belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man’s improvement in himself.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“one can no more hinder criticism than the use of eyes, tongues, and judgment.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Events which seem to us dramatic are nothing more than subjects which our souls convert into tragedy or comedy according to the bent of our characters.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“The Oratorian boarding school in Vendôme, which Balzac was sent to at a young age. It was a gruelling and miserable place to live, with severe monastic rules.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“The differences between a soldier, an artisan, a man of business, a lawyer, an idler, a student, a statesman, a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a beggar, a priest, are as great, though not so easy to define, as those between the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow, the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc. Thus social species have always existed, and will always exist, just as there are zoological species.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“I come across journalists in theatre lobbies; it makes me shudder to see them. Journalism is an inferno, a bottomless pit of iniquity and treachery and lies; no one can traverse it undefiled, unless, like Dante, he is protected by Virgil’s sacred laurel.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“The region is a desert of stones, a solitude with a character of its own, an arid spot, which could only be inhabited by beings who had either attained to absolute nullity, or were gifted with some abnormal strength of soul.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“am fully convinced that it is impossible for a woman, even if she were born close to a throne, to acquire before the age of five-and-twenty the encyclopaedic knowledge of trifles, the practice of manoeuvring, the important small things, the musical tones and harmony of coloring, the angelic bedevilments and innocent cunning, the speech and the silence, the seriousness and the banter, the wit and the obtuseness, the diplomacy and the ignorance which make up the perfect lady.””
— Honoré de Balzac
“Laws are like spiders’ webs; the big flies get through, while the little ones are caught.””
— Honoré de Balzac
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Balzac, Honoré de. The Works of Honoré De Balzac: About Catherine De' Medici, Seraphita, and Other Stories. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-works-of-honor-de-balzac-about-catherine-de-medici-seraphita-and-other-stori-cb7e2a70-8415-4957-b823-f27cdf76f1d0.Balzac, H. D. (n.d.). The Works of Honoré De Balzac: About Catherine De' Medici, Seraphita, and Other Stories. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-works-of-honor-de-balzac-about-catherine-de-medici-seraphita-and-other-stori-cb7e2a70-8415-4957-b823-f27cdf76f1d0Balzac, Honoré de. The Works of Honoré De Balzac: About Catherine De' Medici, Seraphita, and Other Stories. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-works-of-honor-de-balzac-about-catherine-de-medici-seraphita-and-other-stori-cb7e2a70-8415-4957-b823-f27cdf76f1d0.
