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Book, page 241 / 264 the names and characters of his heroes and heroines in the /Astree/, and had founded an academy of true lovers. Almost the same thing occurred to the nineteenth-century Honore de Balzac. For a while, certain people in Venetian society assumed the titles and roles of his chief personages, playing the parts, in some instances, out to their utmost conclusion. Sainte-Beuve, who, in 1850, drew attention to this curious historical analogy, went on to mention that, in Hungary, Poland, and Russia, Balzac's novels created a fashion. The strange, rich furniture that was assembled and arranged, according to the novelist's fancy, out of the artistic productions of many countries and epochs, became an after-reality. Numerous wealthy persons prided themselves on possessing what the author had merely imagined. The interior of their houses was adorned /a la Balzac/. One evening at Vienna, says his sister, he entered a concert-room, where, as soon as his presence was perceived and bruited about, all the audience rose in his honour; and, at the end of the entertainment, a student seized his hand and kissed it, exclaiming: "I bless the hand that wrote /Seraphita/." Balzac himself relates that, once travelling in Russia, he and his friends, as night was coming on, went and asked for hospitality at a castle. On their entrance, the lady of the house and some other members of the fair sex vied with each other in eagerness to serve the guests. One of the younger ladies hurried to the kitchen for refreshment. In the meantime, the novelist's identity was revealed to the /chatelaine/. A lively conversation was immediately engaged in, and, when the impromptu Abigail returned with the refreshment, the first words she heard were: "Well, Monsieur Balzac, so you think--" Full of surprise and joy she started, dropped the tray she had in her hands, and everything was broken. "Glory I have known and seen," adds the narrator; "wasn't that glory?" It was more. It was power wielded for good or evil, like that of every other great man, be he statesman, or priest, or artist. The conviction of possessing this power caused Balzac to complain with sincere indignation of those who charged him with being an immoral writer. "The reproach of immorality," he said in his preface to the second edition of /Pere Goriot/, "which has ever been launched at the courageous author, is the last that remains to be made, when nothing
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