Love in a Mask, or Imprudence and Happiness

Written by Honoré de Balzac

Narrated by Lee Smalley

Love in a Mask, or Imprudence and Happiness, is an entertaining short novel by Honoré de Balzac, unpublished in his lifetime. Beginning with a flirtatious conversation at a masked ball, Balzac introduces his two main characters, a beautiful wealthy young widow and a gallant cavalry officer, and demonstrates his creative genius with deft plot twists of hidden identity and romantic intrigue.The translation is by Alice M. Ivimy. --Lee Smalley

• Language: English
• Publisher: LibriVox
• Release date: Aug 25, 2014

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.