Book123

    Free register and download UseNet downloader, then you can FREE Download from UseNet.

    Download without Limit " The Girl With The Golden Eyes by Honore De Balzac Trans By Ellen Marriage " from UseNet for FREE!

PREPARER'S NOTE

The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third part of a trilogy. Part

one is entitled Ferragus and part two is The Duchesse de Langeais.

The three stories are frequently combined under the title The

Thirteen.

DEDICATION

To Eugene Delacroix, Painter.

THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES

One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is,

surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace--a people fearful

to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in

perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled

along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by

death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and

contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the

poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as

masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of

joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible

signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A

few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its

cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages--youth and decay:

youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at

this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection,

experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that

vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot

even extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be

corrupted. A few words will suffice to justify physiologically the

almost infernal hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport

that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth. There

all is smoke and fire, everything gleams, crackles, flames,

evaporates, dies out, then lights up again, with shooting sparks, and

is consumed. In no other country has life ever been more ardent or

acute. The social nature, even in fusion, seems to say after each

completed work: "Pass on to another!" just as Nature says herself.

Like Nature herself, this social nature is busied with insects and

flowers of a day--ephemeral trifles; and so, too, it throws up fire

and flame from its eternal crater. Perhaps, before analyzing the

causes which lend a special physiognomy to each tribe of this

intelligent and mobile nation, the general cause should be pointed out

which bleaches and discolors, tints with blue or brown individuals in

more or less degree.

Buy It at Lowest Price on Amazon

Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123