A Man of Business

By Honoré de Balzac

Though a relatively short story, "A Man of Business" is an important component of Honoré de Balzac's vast story cycle The Human Comedy, involving many of the recurring characters from the series and tying up a number of loose ends. As a fete thrown at the home of his mistress begins to wind down, Cardot invites the lingering merrymakers to settle around the table and begins telling a story about a clever debt-collection scheme. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary fiction and nonfiction, Sheba Blake Publishing Corp. is extremely dedicated to bringing to the forefront the amazing works of long dead and truly talented authors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing Corp.
• Release date: Mar 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781222378382

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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A Man of Business

Honoré de Balzac

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A Man of Business

The word lorette is a euphemism invented to describe the status of a personage, or a personage of a status, of which it is awkward to speak; the French Academie, in its modesty, having omitted to supply a definition out of regard for the age of its forty members. Whenever a new word comes to supply the place of an unwieldy circumlocution, its fortune is assured; the word lorette has passed into the language of every class of society, even where the lorette herself will never gain an entrance. It was only invented in 1840, and derived beyond a doubt from the agglomeration of such swallows’ nests about the Church of Our Lady of Loretto. This information is for etymoligists only. Those gentlemen would not be so often in a quandary if mediaeval writers had only taken such pains with details of contemporary manners as we take in these days of analysis and description.

Mlle. Turquet, or Malaga, for she is better known by her pseudonym (See La fausse Maitresse.), was one of the earliest parishioners of that charming church. At the time to which this story belongs, that lighthearted and lively damsel gladdened the existence of a notary with a wife somewhat too bigoted, rigid, and frigid for domestic happiness.

Now, it so fell out that one Carnival evening Maitre Cardot was entertaining guests at Mlle. Turquet’s house—Desroches the attorney, Bixiou of the caricatures, Lousteau the journalist, Nathan, and others; it is quite unnecessary to give any further description of these personages, all bearers of illustrious names in the Comedie Humaine. Young La Palferine, in spite of his title of Count and his great descent, which, alas! means a great descent in fortune likewise, had honored the notary’s little establishment with his presence.

At dinner, in such a house, one does not expect to meet the patriarchal beef, the skinny