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The Thirteen

By Honoré de Balzac

2019-11-25 20:09:39

Brief Extract: To tell the truth, there is more power than taste throughout the Histoire des Treize, and perhaps not very much less unreality than power. Balzac is very much better than Eugene Sue, though Eugene Sue also is better than it is the fash ... Read more
Brief Extract: To tell the truth, there is more power than taste throughout the Histoire des Treize, and perhaps not very much less unreality than power. Balzac is very much better than Eugene Sue, though Eugene Sue also is better than it is the fashion to think him just now. But he is here, to a certain extent competing with Sue on the latter’s own ground. The notion of the “Devorants”—of a secret society of men devoted to each other’s interests, entirely free from any moral or legal scruple, possessed of considerable means in wealth, ability, and position, all working together, by fair means or foul, for good ends or bad—is, no doubt, rather seducing to the imagination at all times; and it so happened that it was particularly seducing to the imagination of that time. And its example has been powerful since; it gave us Mr. Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights only, as it were, the other day. Less

Book Details

File size318.25 KB
Print pages320
PublisherPublic Domain Book
Publication date2008-08-18
LanguageEnglish
ISBN978-1169320130
Honoré de Balzac was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a pan...

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