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Honorine By: Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) |
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By Honore De Balzac Translated by Clara Bell DEDICATION To Monsieur Achille Deveria An affectionate remembrance from the Author. HONORINE
If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English
have a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps
sufficient reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be
found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of France
outside France. Other countries can show admirable scenery, and they
frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes but
slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a bewildering
magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither grace nor noble
manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for conversation, the
"Attic salt" so familiar at Paris, the prompt apprehension of what one
is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of the unspoken, which is half
the French language, is nowhere else to be met with. Hence a Frenchman,
whose raillery, as it is, finds so little comprehension, would wither
in a foreign land like an uprooted tree. Emigration is counter to the
instincts of the French nation. Many Frenchmen, of the kind here in
question, have owned to pleasure at seeing the custom house officers
of their native land, which may seem the most daring hyperbole of
patriotism. This preamble is intended to recall to such Frenchmen as have traveled
the extreme pleasure they have felt on occasionally finding their native
land, like an oasis, in the drawing room of some diplomate: a pleasure
hard to be understood by those who have never left the asphalt of the
Boulevard des Italiens, and to whom the Quais of the left bank of the
Seine are not really Paris. To find Paris again! Do you know what that
means, O Parisians? It is to find not indeed the cookery of the Rocher
de Cancale as Borel elaborates it for those who can appreciate it, for
that exists only in the Rue Montorgueil but a meal which reminds you
of it! It is to find the wines of France, which out of France are to be
regarded as myths, and as rare as the woman of whom I write! It is
to find not the most fashionable pleasantry, for it loses its aroma
between Paris and the frontier but the witty understanding, the
critical atmosphere in which the French live, from the poet down to the
artisan, from the duchess to the boy in the street. In 1836, when the Sardinian Court was residing at Genoa, two Parisians,
more or less famous, could fancy themselves still in Paris when they
found themselves in a palazzo, taken by the French Consul General, on
the hill forming the last fold of the Apennines between the gate of San
Tomaso and the well known lighthouse, which is to be seen in all the
keepsake views of Genoa. This palazzo is one of the magnificent villas
on which Genoese nobles were wont to spend millions at the time when the
aristocratic republic was a power. If the early night is beautiful anywhere, it surely is at Genoa, after
it has rained as it can rain there, in torrents, all the morning; when
the clearness of the sea vies with that of the sky; when silence reigns
on the quay and in the groves of the villa, and over the marble heads
with yawning jaws, from which water mysteriously flows; when the stars
are beaming; when the waves of the Mediterranean lap one after another
like the avowal of a woman, from whom you drag it word by word. It must
be confessed, that the moment when the perfumed air brings fragrance to
the lungs and to our day dreams; when voluptuousness, made visible and
ambient as the air, holds you in your easy chair; when, a spoon in your
hand, you sip an ice or a sorbet, the town at your feet and fair woman
opposite such Boccaccio hours can be known only in Italy and on the
shores of the Mediterranean. Imagine to yourself, round the table, the Marquis di Negro, a knight
hospitaller to all men of talent on their travels, and the Marquis
Damaso Pareto, two Frenchmen disguised as Genoese, a Consul General
with a wife as beautiful as a Madonna, and two silent children silent
because sleep has fallen on them the French Ambassador and his wife,
a secretary to the Embassy who believes himself to be crushed and
mischievous; finally, two Parisians, who have come to take leave of
the Consul's wife at a splendid dinner, and you will have the picture
presented by the terrace of the villa about the middle of May a picture
in which the predominant figure was that of a celebrated woman, on
whom all eyes centered now and again, the heroine of this improvised
festival... Continue reading book >>
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