On a coach ride between towns, a callow young man gets caught up in
a round of tale-telling with his fellow passengers and ends up
committing an indiscretion that will take a lifetime to undo . . .
In the town of Besancon, a cloistered young girl reads a romance
penned by a mysterious newcomer and schemes to take the place of
the story's real-life inspiration: a beautiful Italian duchess . .
. Two lovers stand in defiance of the age-old feud that has
decimated their families: a vendetta that even Napoleon Bonaparte
himself may be powerless to stop . . . Beginning again in life,
whether in one's profession, or, to a lesser extent, for the
purpose of concealing one's identity, is the theme that unifies the
three stories (A Start in Life, Albert Savarus, and The Vendetta)
in this volume of The Human Comedy. Left unfinished at the time of
Balzac's death, La Comedie Humaine is a vast literary undertaking
composed of some hundred short stories, novellas, and novels set in
the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars during the Bourbon Restoration
and the July Monarchy. Throughout, Balzac utilizes nineteenth
century French society to examine humanity and the human experience
with all its attendant virtues, vices, and peculiarities. The third
volume of Noumena Press's Human Comedy features detailed background
information on each of the stories, 27 illustrations, more than 60
pages of annotations, and two appendices that contain "Journey by
Coucou" by Laure Surville (Balzac's sister) and "Mateo Falcone" by
Prosper Merimee--stories that were the inspiration for Balzac's A
Start in Life and The Vendetta, respectively. "Journey by Coucou"
appears in English translation here for the first time. Honore de
Balzac (1799-1850) was one of France's most prolific and
influential authors. In his lifetime, he worked as a legal clerk,
publisher, printer, businessman, and even ran for political office.
Failing in all these endeavors, he was nonetheless able to make use
of these experiences in his writing to create some of the most
memorable stories and characters in French literature.
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