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    A Passion in the Desert
    A Passion in the Desert
    A Passion in the Desert
    Ebook38 pages42 minutes

    A Passion in the Desert

    By Honoré de Balzac

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    A Passion in the Desert
    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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      Book preview

      A Passion in the Desert - Honoré de Balzac

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Passion in the Desert, 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: A Passion in the Desert

      Author: Honore de Balzac

      Translator: Ernest Dowson

      Release Date: December, 1998 [Etext #1555]

      Posting Date: February 26, 2010

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PASSION IN THE DESERT ***

      Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

      A PASSION IN THE DESERT

      By Honore De Balzac

      Translated by Ernest Dowson

      A PASSION IN THE DESERT

      The whole show is dreadful, she cried coming out of the menagerie of M. Martin. She had just been looking at that daring speculator working with his hyena,—to speak in the style of the programme.

      By what means, she continued, can he have tamed these animals to such a point as to be certain of their affection for——

      What seems to you a problem, said I, interrupting, is really quite natural.

      Oh! she cried, letting an incredulous smile wander over her lips.

      You think that beasts are wholly without passions? I asked her. Quite the reverse; we can communicate to them all the vices arising in our own state of civilization.

      She looked at me with an air of astonishment.

      But, I continued, "the first time I saw M. Martin, I admit, like you, I did give vent to an exclamation of surprise. I found myself next to an old soldier with the right leg amputated, who had come in with me. His face had struck me. He had one of those heroic heads, stamped with the seal of warfare, and on which the battles of Napoleon are written. Besides, he had that frank, good-humored expression which always impresses me favorably. He was without doubt one of those troopers who are surprised at nothing, who find matter for laughter in the contortions of a dying comrade, who bury or plunder him quite light-heartedly, who stand intrepidly in the way of bullets;—in fact, one of those men who waste no time in deliberation, and would not hesitate to make friends with the devil himself. After looking very attentively at the proprietor of the menagerie getting out of his box, my companion pursed up his lips with an air of mockery and contempt, with that peculiar and expressive twist which

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