Honor De Balzac: 1029 books

On a cold morning in December, towards the close of the year 1612, a young man, whose clothing betrayed his poverty, was standing before the door of a house in the Rue des Grands-Augustine, in Paris. After walking to and fro for some time with the hesitation of a lover who fears to approach his mistress,...

This exclamation was made by a lawyer's clerk of the class called in French offices a gutter–jumper—a messenger in fact—who at this moment was eating a piece of dry bread with a hearty appetite. He pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it gleefully through the open pane...

The brightest memories of the old man faded at the sight of his nephew's so-called mistress. His anger died away at the gracious exclamation which came from his lips as he looked at her. By one of those fortunate accidents which happen only to pretty women, it was a moment when all her beauties shone with peculiar lustre, due perhaps to the wax-lights.

Lucien had gone to Paris; and David Sechard, with the courage and intelligence of the ox which painters give the Evangelist for accompanying symbol, set himself to make the large fortune for which he had wished that evening down by the Charente, when he sat with Eve by the weir, and she gave him her...

Ce roman a pour « personnage » principal la fortune du père Grandet. Celui-ci « a su » que Bonaparte signerait le Concordat et qu’on pouvait sans risque s’approprier ce qui appartenait aux communautés religieuses; mais anticipant le retour possible des nobles ralliés à Napoléon ou fidèles aux Bourbons (Louis XVIII), il s’arrange pour les ménager.

Early in the autumn of 1826 the Abbe Birotteau, the principal personage of this history, was overtaken by a shower of rain as he returned home from a friend's house, where he had been passing the evening. He therefore crossed, as quickly as his corpulence would allow, the deserted little square called...

Bianchon, a physician to whom science owes a fine system of theoretical physiology, and who, while still young, made himself a celebrity in the medical school of Paris, that central luminary to which European doctors do homage, practised surgery for a long time before he took up medicine. His earliest...

In September, 1835, one of the richest heiresses of the faubourg Saint–Germain, Mademoiselle du Rouvre, the only daughter of the Marquis du Rouvre, married Comte Adam Mitgislas Laginski, a young Polish exile...

Dedicated to the Comtesse Clara Maffei.