Beatrix

by

Honoré de Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

eBooks@Adelaide
2007

This web edition published by eBooks@Adelaide.

Rendered into HTML by Steve Thomas.

Last updated Wednesday August 08 2007.

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Table of Contents

  1. A BRETON TOWN AND MANSION
  2. THE BARON, HIS WIFE, AND SISTER
  3. THREE BRETON SILHOUETTES
  4. A NORMAL EVENING
  5. CALYSTE
  6. BIOGRAPHY OF CAMILLE MAUPIN
  7. LES TOUCHES
  8. LA MARQUISE BEATRIX
  9. A FIRST MEETING
  10. DRAMA
  11. FEMALE DIPLOMACY
  12. CORRESPONDENCE
  13. DUEL BETWEEN WOMEN
  14. AN EXCURSION TO CROISIC
  15. CONTI
  16. SICKNESS UNTO DEATH
  17. A DEATH: A MARRIAGE
  18. THE END OF A HONEY-MOON
  19. THE FIRST LIE OF A PIOUS DUCHESS
  20. A SHORT TREATISE ON CERTAINTY: BUT NOT FROM PASCAL’S POINT OF VIEW
  21. THE WICKEDNESS OF A GOOD WOMAN
  22. THE NORMAL HISTORY OF AN UPPER-CLASS GRISETTE
  23. ONE OF THE DISEASES OF THE AGE
  24. THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL RELATIONS AND POSITION
  25. A PRINCE OF BOHEMIA
  26. DISILLUSIONS—IN ALL BUT LA FONTAINE’S FABLES

NOTE

It is somewhat remarkable that Balzac, dealing as he did with traits of character and the minute and daily circumstances of life, has never been accused of representing actual persons in the two or three thousand portraits which he painted of human nature.

In “The Great Man of the Provinces in Paris” some likenesses were imagined: Jules Janin in Etienne Lousteau, Armand Carrel in Michel Chrestien, and, possibly, Berryer in Daniel d’Arthez. But in the present volume, “Beatrix,” he used the characteristics of certain persons, which were recognized and admitted at the time of publication. Mademoiselle des Touches (Camille Maupin) is George Sand in character, and the personal description of her, though applied by some to the famous Mademoiselle Georges, is easily recognized from Couture’s drawing. Beatrix, Conti, and Claude Vignon are sketches of the Comtesse d’Agoult, Liszt, and the well-known critic Gustave Planche.

The opening scene of this volume, representing the manners and customs of the old Breton family, a social state existing no longer except in history, and the transition period of the vieille roche as it passed into the customs and ideas of the present century, is one of Balzac’s remarkable and most famous pictures in the “Comedy of Human Life.”

K.P.W.

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Last updated on Tue Aug 28 16:38:13 2007 for eBooks@Adelaide.