Search Results

“... If Balzac had had his way, the real Paris would have become a little more like the visionary Paris of his novels. He thought a spiral staircase should be built, leading down from the Luxembourg Gardens into the catacombs, whose verminous labyrinth stretched from there indiscriminately beneath the plush hôtels of the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the slums of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau ...”

“... Paul Cézanne, Emile Bernard records a conversation in which he raised with Cézanne the topic of Balzac’s Le Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu – the story of the fictional painter Frenhofer, who spends ten years trying to create the perfect picture of a woman but ends up painting what, in the story itself (which mixes fiction with 17th-century fact), the young ...”

“... inviolability of the home were exchanged between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M. de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests.If ever a man feels the sweetness, the utility of friendship, must it not be that moral ...”

“... His father was a book publisher but in the 1830s he went bankrupt – the Dictionnaire universel de droit français ruined him – and the family decamped to Lyon. Félix pursued his studies, not very seriously, and then enrolled in medical school, but his time there was cut short by his father’s sudden death in 1837. He became the family breadwinner, with ...”

“... Boy does, on the phenomenon of emergent genius in the childhood years of their authors: Du côté de chez Swann, also published in 1913, and A Portrait of the Artist, published in 1916. James began writing A Small Boy when he was 68. Two events had recently come together in his life which in combination help explain not only his motives for starting to write ...”