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The Last Fay
Balzac's 1824 novel The Last Fay marks an important turn in his literary career, with his distinguishing features as a writer taking shape. This translation includes an introduction placing the novel in the context of Balzac's literary development and personal affinities.
The Bureaucrats
The Bureaucrats (Les Employes) stands out in Balzac's immense Human Comedy by concentrating precisely and penetratingly on a distinctive "modern" institution: France's state bureaucracy. Rabourdin, aided by his unscrupulous wife, attempts to reorganize and streamline the entire system. Rabourdin's plan will halve the government's size while doubling its revenue. When the plan is leaked, Rabourdin's rival—an utter incompetent—gains the overwhelming support of the frightened and desperate body of low-ranking functionaries. The novel contains the recognizable themes of Balzac's work: obsessive ambition, conspiracy and human pettiness, and a melodramatic struggle between the social good and the evils of folly and stupidity. It is also an unusual, dramatized analysis of a developing political institution and its role in shaping social class and mentality.
Otherwise Engaged
At one and twenty, Lady Angelica Fitzhugh, the youngest sibling of the Earl of Hillcrest, has been rusticating in rural Hampshire for two years. After her first Season, her betrothed managed only second place in a duel to the death just two days before their wedding.Out of the blue, her papa has informed her that to save the Hillcrest dynasty, in five days she is to wed the rather ancient Earl of Scarborough, become the step-mama to his twin daughters, and sail to Australia on her husband’s swansong voyage as an admiral in Her Majesty’s Navy.After two engagements and one wedding, the new Countess of Scarborough finds herself in a quandary. For it appears that her elderly husband much prefers the cabin boy’s bed to hers.Angelica finds herself caught up in a series of thrilling, chilling and romantic adventures after her arrival at her new home in Australia. Otherwise Engaged is a purely delicious Victorian romance just waiting for the sparks to fly.
Bureaucracy
CHAPTER I. THE RABOURDIN HOUSEHOLD In Paris, where men of thought and study bear a certain likeness to one another, living as they do in a common centre, you must have met with several resembling Monsieur Rabourdin, whose acquaintance we are about to make at a moment when he is head of a bureau in one of our most important ministries. At this period he was forty years old, with gray hair of so pleasing a shade that women might at a pinch fall in love with it for it softened a somewhat melancholy countenance, blue eyes full of fire, a skin that was still fair, though rather ruddy and touched here and there with strong red marks; a forehead and nose a la Louis XV., a serious mouth, a tall figu...
Evolution, Sacrifice, and Narrative
First published in 1990. Balzac, Zola and Faulkner all drew upon the principles of evolutionary theory to represent man’s place in nature and his struggle for survival in their major series La Comèdie humaine, Rougon-Macquart and the Yoknapatawpha fiction. This book focuses on the ‘first’ novels in each author’s series (La Père Goriot, La Fortune des Rougon and Flags in the Dust) and considers how each novel relates to its series and derives a definition of the naturalistic roman-fleuve. To describe this development, the issues of how a scientific idea becomes refracted in a literary genre and how the naturalistic novel developed out of the realistic novel are considered.
Vautrin and the Resources of Quinola and Other Stories
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was one of the premiere French novelists. This is a collection of his stories.
