Back to Blog
Balzac by Graham Robb5/20/2023 ![]() ![]() In 1814 his family moved to Paris, just in time to see Napoleon's fall. It must have stood him in good stead in the excellent schools through which he passed like quicksilver, and in the law offices where he spent hisĪdolescence learning how contracts were drawn up and how one gets around them.īalzac was born the year Napoleon made himself master of France. Few in France would carp at Balzac's view that nothingĪffirms the spirit more than constant dissembling in the bosom of one's family. There is little doubt that parental affection was scant, but if that left its mark, it did as much for many generations of people. Practice in France well into the 20th century. ![]() Robb, a British specialist in French literature who gives us this compendious and readable biography of Honore de Balzac, makes rather too much of the boy's spending the first four years of life in foster care, which was a common SON of a loathsome but physically attractive mother and of a self-made, self-indulgent father, the greatest novelist of the 19th century, and perhaps of all time, was born in 1799, at Tours in the Loire country where so many of his tales unfold. September 11, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - FinalīALZAC A Life. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |