The Wrong Side of Paris, the final novel in Balzac's The Human Comedy, is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who.
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- The Wrong Side of Paris by Honoré de Balzac
- The Reading Life Katherine Mansfield Project
- The Wrong Side of Paris
If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Learn more about Amazon Prime. Presided over by Madame de La Chanterie, a noblewoman with a tragic past, the house is inhabited by a remarkable band of men—all scarred by the tumultuous aftermath of the French Revolution—who have devoted their lives to performing anonymous acts of charity.
He agrees to travel—incognito—to a Parisian slum to save a noble family from ruin. Read more Read less.
The Wrong Side of Paris by Honoré de Balzac
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Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. A later novel of Balzac, this is a bit more sentimental than his earlier work. However, there are great passages of description and insight and a more optimistic view of life than he is famous for. The battle to keep up appearances when poverty is the reality is movingly told. This one recounts the tale of a young man who is struggling with life, after experiencing a series of failures. He falls in with a religious secret society that embraces charity. In the first half of the book, he learns of the sorrows of his fellows in the religious society, and in the second half he embarks on his first mission of charity, which is to rescue a nobleman who has fallen on hard times, his severely ill daughter, and his son.
The tale gets more and more complicated, and within the last ten pages there's an amazing series of surprises.
The Reading Life Katherine Mansfield Project
The translator's preface is a bit of a laugh, though, with some high-falutin' talk, and some very American opinions. My knowledge of French history and politics is sketchy and I'm not well-acquainted with French literature, and so I stumbled into what is evidently a minor work by a prolific and popular writer. I must say this: The translator of this book must be a genius and a poet, for the prose is delicious and kinetic.
And now my impression of Balzac--bearing in mind the above-mentioned, perhaps regrettable lack of context--is that of a voracious, curious, natural storyteller with great energy and wit to spare. He paints vivid pictures external and internal. Holding it all together with all this weight is quite a feat. With this volume, the curtain is brought down on Balzac's heroic, "The Human Comedy". It is hard for me to resist Balzac, even when I make a effort to do so as I did with this book. I found it, until about two thirds into it, exceedingly tedious, harping on as he does, about the Catholic church and conservative virtue.
It wasn't until the primary character, Godefroid, re-enters the Parisian world from his confinement with The Order of the Brothers of Consolation that I felt at last in the company of Balzac the master. He very slowly enters into this tale and it is, after all, near the end of his exhausting, prodigious and sometimes absurd life that he wrote this short, two part story. But "The Wrong Side of Paris" delighted me in many of the ways his great volumes do; wonderful perspectives of 19th century Paris some vanished, some still existing , his usual great asides about writers and their perils and his digs at the publishing industry, delicious humor and irony and his extraordinary talent for dialogue.
People of good blood aspire to a title, while people with titles aspire to the peerage. The opening section of The Secrets of the Princess Cadignan provides an explanation of why the title of prince is not prevalent nor coveted in France compared to contemporary Germany or Russia. The difference in outcome is partly explained by Balzac's views on heredity: This deficit is compounded by the fact that his mother had not only married a commoner far beneath her in rank, but she had also performed menial labour to support herself when her husband died.
Another contrast is between Emile Blondet and Raoul Nathan.
Both are multi-talented men-of-letters. He marries Madame de Montcornet and eventually becomes a prefect. Nathan is described as half-Jewish and possessing a second-rate mind. Nathan succumbs to the flattery of unscrupulous financiers and does not see that they are prepared to bankrupt him to achieve their purposes. Blondet sees what is happening but does not enlighten Nathan.
The Wrong Side of Paris
The downfall drives Nathan to attempt suicide by the method of "any poor work-girl". In the end he accepts the cross of the Legion of Honour which he formerly satirised and becomes a defender of the doctrine of heredity. We are left in no doubt that it is the second option that produces what Balzac considers to be the ideal woman.
Ursula is pious and prone to collapsing in tears at the slightest emotion. The latter category also includes several lesbian or bisexual characters. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. A Life , pg. Norton and Company, Inc.
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Lippincott Company, London, Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford: Oxford University Press, May Retrieved 23 August Dante 's Divine Comedy. Retrieved from " https: Views Read Edit View history. This page was last edited on 6 August , at