French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)
What a handsome woman it was that I saw in another moment! She had flung an Indian shawl hastily over her bare shoulders, covering herself with it completely, while it revealed the bare outlines of the form beneath. She wore a loose gown trimmed with snowy ruffles, which told plainly that her laundress’ bills amounted to something like two thousand francs in the course of a year. Her dark curls escaped from beneath a bright Indian handkerchief, knotted carelessly about her head after the fashion of Creole women. The bed lay in disorder that told of broken slumber. A painter would have paid money to stay a while to see the scene that I saw. Under the luxurious hanging draperies, the pillow, crushed into the depths of an eider-down quilt, its lace border standing out in contrast against the background of blue silk, bore a vague impress that kindled the imagination. A pair of satin slippers gleamed from the great bear-skin rug spread by the carved mahogany lions at the bed-foot, where she had flung them off in her weariness after the ball. A crumpled gown hung over a chair, the sleeves touching the floor; stockings which a breath would have blown away were twisted about the leg of an easy-chair; while ribbon garters straggled over a settee. A fan of price, half unfolded, glittered on the chimney-piece. Drawers stood open; flowers, diamonds, gloves, a bouquet, a girdle, were littered about. The room was full of vague sweet perfume. And—beneath all the luxury and disorder, beauty and incongruity, I saw Misery crouching in wait for her or for her adorer, Misery rearing its head, for the Countess had begun to feel the edge of those fangs. Her tired face was an epitome of the room strewn with relics of past festival. The scattered gewgaws, pitiable this morning, when gathered together and coherent, had turned heads the night before.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
For two months the Comte de Restaud lay on his bed, alone, and resigned to his fate. Mortal disease was slowly sapping the strength of mind and body. Unaccountable and grotesque sick fancies preyed upon him; he would not suffer them to set his room in order, no one could nurse him, he would not even allow them to make his bed. All his surroundings bore the marks of this last degree of apathy, the furniture was out of place, the daintiest trifles were covered with dust and cobwebs. In health he had been a man of refined and expensive tastes, now he positively delighted in the comfortless look of the room.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Seraphita
We think, without fear of being deceived, that married people who have lived twenty years together may sleep in peace without fear of having their love trespassed upon or of incurring the scandal of a lawsuit for criminal conversation.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter. Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought, had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions. This double nature of ours makes of man both an animal and a lover.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
The fate of the home depends on the first night.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Thwarted passion and mortified vanity are great babblers.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
The moment a wife decides to break her marriage vow she reckons her husband as everything or nothing.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in Paris, and vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too rarely meets with.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Most composers make use of the orchestral parts in a vague, incoherent way, combining them for a merely temporary effect; they do not persistently contribute to the whole mass of the movement by their steady and regular progress. Beethoven assigns its part to each tone-quality from the first. Like the various companies which, by their disciplined movements, contribute to winning a battle, the orchestral parts of a symphony by Beethoven obey the plan ordered for the interest of all, and are subordinate to an admirably conceived scheme.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gambara
In a lover the coarsest desire always shows itself as a burst of honest admiration.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Père Goriot
For a whole fortnight now, my dear, I have been living the life of society; one evening at the Italiens, another at the Grand Opera, and always a ball afterwards. Ah! society is a witching world.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
What frightful tableaux might present themselves, if one could paint the ideas found in the souls of those who surround the deathbeds? And money is always the mobilizer of the intrigues elaborated, the plans formulated, the conspiracies woven!
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Gobseck
Girls brought up as you were, in a very strait-laced and puritan fashion, always pant for liberty and happiness, and the happiness they have never comes up to what they imagined.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
If a man cannot distinguish the difference between the pleasures of two consecutive nights, he has married too early.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
If the man has genius ... he certainly has neither the constancy nor the patience which sanctifies it, and makes it a thing divine. He endeavors to impose on the world by placing himself on a level which he does nothing to maintain. True talent, pains-taking and honorable talent does not act thus. Men who possess such talent follow their path courageously; they accept its pains and penalties, and don’t cover them with tinsel.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A Daughter of Eve
When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything, not even our virtues.
HONORE DE BALZAC
The Muse of the Department
Of all the miseries that civil war can bring upon a country the greatest lies in the appeal which one of the contestants always ends by making to some foreign government.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Physiology of Marriage
All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
HONORE DE BALZAC
Louis Lambert