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    Study of a Woman
    Study of a Woman
    Study of a Woman
    Ebook37 pages24 minutes

    Study of a Woman

    By Honoré de Balzac

    3.5/5

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1971
    Study of a Woman
    Author

    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.

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    • 5/5
      Two short stories about two very complex women are included on the CD. The first, and very short Étude de Femme (Study of a Woman in English) features the handsome Eugène de Rastignac, found in several Balzac novels. Here, he has somehow attracted the attention of the marquise de Listomère, a woman well known for her irreproachable character who has never taken on lovers. She isn't Rastignac's type either, being rather plain, but when Rastignac mistakenly sends her a letter intended for his current lover Delphine de Nucingen, an interesting situation arises which reveals in few words a great deal about the marquise. The second story, La Grande Bretèche is a wonderfully wicked Gothic extravaganza. When doctor Horace Bianchon discovers a dilapidated and abandoned house which has obviously been a beautifully appointed domain in the past, he becomes fascinated with it and cannot resist roaming it's grounds and unsuccessfully trying to enter the house to discover the secret hidden behind it's walls. He is promptly visited by a notary who warns him that he has been illegally loitering on private property. The notary is the executor of the former occupant's will. In it, Madame de Merret decrees that no one is to enter the house or make any changes or repairs to it for fifty years following her death. We find out why she has made this strange request as her story unfolds. I'm sure it would have delighted Hitchcock, who may well have derived inspiration from it.

    Book preview

    Study of a Woman - Honoré de Balzac

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of Study of a Woman, by Honore de Balzac

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: Study of a Woman

    Author: Honore de Balzac

    Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

    Release Date: July, 1997 [Etext #1373]

    Posting Date: February 23, 2010

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDY OF A WOMAN ***

    Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

    STUDY OF A WOMAN

    By Honore De Balzac

    Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

    DEDICATION

    To the Marquis Jean-Charles di Negro.

    STUDY OF A WOMAN

    The Marquise de Listomere is one of those young women who have been brought up in the spirit of the Restoration. She has principles, she fasts, takes the sacrament, and goes to balls and operas very elegantly dressed; her confessor permits her to combine the mundane with sanctity. Always in conformity with the Church and with the world, she presents a living image of the present day, which seems to have taken the word legality for its motto. The conduct of the marquise shows precisely enough religious devotion to attain under a new Maintenon to the gloomy piety of the last days of Louis XIV., and enough worldliness to adopt the habits of gallantry of the first years of that reign, should it ever be revived. At the present moment she is strictly virtuous from policy, possibly from inclination. Married for the last seven years to the Marquis de Listomere, one of those deputies who expect a peerage, she may also consider that such conduct will promote the ambitions of her family. Some women are reserving their opinion of her until the moment when Monsieur de Listomere becomes a peer of France, when she herself will be thirty-six years of age,—a period of life when most women

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