A Woman of Thirty by Honoré de Balzac - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

By Honoré de Balzac

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘A Woman of Thirty by Honoré de Balzac - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Collected Works of Honoré de Balzac’.

Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Balzac includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jul 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788775199

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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HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Criticism

Parts Edition

By Delphi Classics, 2014

Version 1

COPYRIGHT

‘The Criticism’

Honoré de Balzac: Parts Edition (in 116 parts)

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 90890 966 4

Delphi Classics

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Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

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Honoré de Balzac: Parts Edition

This eBook is Part 110 of the Delphi Classics edition of Honoré de Balzac in 116 Parts. It features the unabridged text of The Criticism from the bestselling edition of the author’s Collected Works. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. Our Parts Editions feature original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of Honoré de Balzac, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

Visit here to buy the entire Parts Edition of Honoré de Balzac or the Collected Works of Honoré de Balzac in a single eBook.

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HONORÉ DE BALZAC

IN 116 VOLUMES

Parts Edition Contents

Scenes from Private Life

1, At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

2, The Ball at Sceaux

3, Letters of Two Brides

4, The Purse

5, Modeste Mignon

6, A Start in Life

7, Albert Savarus

8, Vendetta

9, A Second Home

10, Domestic Peace

11, Madame Firmiani

12, Study of a Woman

13, The Imaginary Mistress

14, A Daughter of Eve

15, The Message

16, The Grand Breteche

17, La Grenadiere

18, The Deserted Woman

19, Honorine

20, Beatrix

21, Gobseck

22, A Woman of Thirty

23, Father Goriot

24, Colonel Chabert

25, The Atheist’s Mass

26, The Commission in Lunacy

27, The Marriage Contract

28, Another Study of Woman

Scenes from Provincial Life

29, Ursule Mirouet

30, Eugenie Grandet

The Celibates

31, Pierrette

32, The Vicar of Tours

33, The Two Brothers

Parisians in the Country

34, The Illustrious Gaudissart

35, The Muse of the Department

36, The Old Maid

37, The Collection of Antiquities

Lost Illusions

38, Two Poets

39, A Distinguished Provincial at Paris

40, Eve and David

The Thirteen

41, Ferragus

42, The Duchesse de Langeais

43, Girl with the Golden Eyes

44, Rise and Fall of César Birotteau

45, The Firm of Nucingen

Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life

46, Esther Happy: How a Courtesan Can Love

47, What Love Costs an Old Man

48, The End of Evil Ways

49, Vautrin’s Last Avatar

50, Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan

51, Facino Cane

52, Sarrasine

53, Pierre Grassou

The Poor Relations

54, Cousin Betty

55, Cousin Pons

56, A Man of Business

57, A Prince of Bohemia

58, Gaudissart II

59, Bureaucracy

60, Unconscious Comedians

61, The Lesser Bourgeoisie

The Seamy Side of History

62, Madame de La Chanterie

63, The Initiate

Scenes from Political Life

64, An Episode Under the Terror

65, An Historical Mystery

66, The Deputy of Arcis

67, Monsieur de Sallenauve

68, Z. Marcas

Scenes from Military Life

69, The Chouans

70, A Passion in the Desert

Scenes from Country Life

71, Sons of the Soil

72, The Country Doctor

73, The Village Rector

74, The Lily of the Valley

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

75, The Magic Skin

76, Christ in Flanders

77, Melmoth Reconciled

78, The Unknown Masterpiece

79, Gambara

80, Massimilla Doni

81, The Alkahest

82, The Hated Son

83, Farewell

84, Juana

85, The Recruit

86, El Verdugo

87, A Drama on the Seashore

88, Maitre Cornelius

89, The Red Inn

Catherine de’ Medici

90, The Calvinist Martyr

91, The Secrets of the Ruggieri

92, The Two Dreams

93, The Elixir of Life

94, The Exiles

95, Louis Lambert

96, Seraphita

ANALYTICAL STUDIES

97, Physiology of Marriage

98, Little Miseries of Conjugal Life

Pathology of Social Life

99, Traité de La Vie Élégante

100, Théorie de La Démarche

101, Traité Des Excitants Modernes

The Short Stories

102, Droll Stories

103, The Napoleon of the People

The Plays

104, Introduction to Balzac’s Dramas by J. Walker Mcspadden

105, Vautrin

106, The Resources of Quinola

107, Pamela Giraud

108, The Stepmother

109, Mercadet

The Criticism

110, The Criticism

The Biographies

111, Honoré de Balzac by Albert Keim and Louis Lumet

112, Honoré de Balzac, His Life and Writings by Mary F. Sandars

113, Balzac and Madame Hanska by Elbert Hubbard

114, Balzac by Frederick Lawton

115, Women in the Life of Balzac by Juanita Helm Floyd

116, Glossary of Characters in ‘La Comédie Humaine’

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The Criticism

Honoré de Balzac by Henry James

The following essay was taken from James’ book of literary criticism French Novelists and Poets, published in 1878.  From an early age James was fluent in French and he read widely in the country’s writings. The essays in this collection reveal a deep familiarity with the techniques and themes of Balzac and many other French novelists.

The great novelist Henry James

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

THE French in general do their duty by their great men; they render them a liberal tribute of criticism, commentary, annotation, biographical analysis. They do not, indeed, make them the subject of memoirs in the English sense; there are few French examples of that class of literature to which Boswell’s Johnson and Lockhart’s Scott belong. But there usually clusters about the image of a conspicuous writer an infinite number of travaux, as the French say, of every degree of importance. Many of these are very solid and serious; their authors are generally to be charged with attaching too absolute a value to their heroes. The departed genius is patiently weighed and measured; his works are minutely analysed; the various episodes of his life are made the object of exhaustive research; his letters are published, and his whole personality, physical, moral, intellectual, passes solemnly into literature. He is always in order as a subject; it is admitted that the last word can never be said about him. From this usual fate of eminent Frenchmen, one of the greatest has been strikingly exempted. Honoré de Balzac is weighted neither with the honours nor with the taxes of an accumulated commentary. The critic who proposes to study him, and who looks for extrinsic assistance in his task, perceives such aid to be very meagre. Balzac has been discussed with first- rate ability only by one writer. M. Taine’s essay, incomplete as it is, may be said at any rate to be essentially worthy of its subject. Sainte-Beuve wrote upon Balzac two or three times, but always with striking and inexplicable inadequacy. There is a long article on the author of the Comédie Humaine by Théophile Gautier, which is admirably picturesque but not at all critical. M. Edmond Schérer, a writer upon whom an ample fold of Sainte-Beuve’s mantle has fallen, lately published a few pages which are suggestive, but in which he affirms that Balzac is neither an artist, a master, nor a writer. The great novelist’s countrymen, in a word, have taken him less seriously than was to be expected. If we desire biographical details we are reduced to consulting the very flimsy gossip of M. Léon Gozlan. Balzac has indeed what is called his légende, but it has been chiefly in the keeping of the mere tattlers of literature. The critic is forced to look for the man almost exclusively in his works; and it must be confessed that in the case of a writer so voluminous as Balzac such a field is ample. We should rather rejoice than regret that there are not more pages to turn. Balzac’s complete works occupy twenty-three huge octavo volumes in the stately but inconvenient edition definitive, lately published. There is a prospect of his letters being given to the world in a complementary volume.

I.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC was born at Tours in 1799; he died at Paris in 1850. Most first-rate men at fifty- one have still a good deal of work in them, and there is no reason to believe that, enormous as had been the demands he made upon it, Balzac’s productive force was fully spent. His prefaces are filled with confident promises to publish novels that never appeared. Nevertheless it is impossible altogether to regret that Balzac died with work still in him. He had written enough; he had written too much. His novels, in spite of their extraordinary closeness of tissue, all betray the want of leisure in the author. It is true that shortly before his death he had encountered a change of fortune; he had married a rich woman and he was in a position to drive his pen no faster than his fancy prompted. It is interesting to wonder whether Balzac at leisure — Balzac with that great money-question which was at once the supreme inspiration and the aesthetic alloy of his life, placed on a relatively ideal basis — would have done anything essentially finer than Les Parents Pauvres or Le Père Goriot. We can hardly help doubting it. M. Taine, looking as usual for formulas and labels, says that the most complete description of Balzac is that he was a man of business — a man of business in debt. The formula here is on the whole satisfactory; it expresses not only what he was by circumstances, but what he was by inclination. We cannot say how much Balzac liked being in debt, but we are very sure he liked, for itself, the process of manufacture and sale, and that even when all his debts had been paid he would have continued to keep his shop.

Before he was thirty years old he had published, under a variety of pseudonyms, some twenty long novels, veritable Grub Street productions, written in sordid Paris attics, in poverty, in perfect obscurity. Several of these œuvres de jeunesse have lately been republished, but the best of them are unreadable. No writer ever served a harder apprenticeship to his art, or lingered more hopelessly at the base of the ladder of fame. This early incompetence seems at first an anomaly, but it is only partially an anomaly. That so vigorous a genius should have learned his trade so largely by experiment and so little by divination; that in order to discover what he could do he should have had to make specific trial of each of the things he could not do — this is something which needs explanation. The explanation is found, it seems to us, simply in the folly of his attempting, at that age, to produce such novels as he aspired to produce. It was not that he could not use his wings; it was simply that his wings had not grown. The wings of great poets generally sprout very early; the wings of great artists in prose, great explorers of the sources of prose, begin to spread themselves only after the man is tolerably formed. Good observers, we believe, will confess to a general mistrust of novels written before thirty. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Lamartine, Yictor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, were hardly in their twenties before they struck their fully resonant notes. Walter Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, Madame Sand, waited till they were at least turned thirty, and then without prelude, or with brief prelude, produced a novel that was a masterpiece. If it was well for them to wait, it would have been infinitely better for Balzac. Balzac was to be pre-eminently a social novelist; his strength was to lie in representing the innumerable actual facts of the French civilization of his day — things only to be learned by patient experience. Balzac’s inspiration, his stock, his fonds, was outside of him, in the complex French world of the nineteenth century. If, instead of committing to paper impossible imaginary tales, he could have stood for a while in some other relation to the society about him than that

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