Discount Louis Vuitton An amusing expression of this self-praise has come down to us in the puff he

An amusing expression of this self-praise has come down to us in the puff he composed on the occasion of a reprint of the Shagreen Skin by Gosselin in 1832. “The Philosophic Tales of Monsieur de Balzac,” it announced, “have appeared this week. The Shagreen Skin is judged as the admirable novels of Anne Radcliffe were judged. Such things escape annalists and commentators. The eager reader lays hold of these books. They bring sleeplessness into the mansions of the rich and into the garret of the poet; they animate the village. In winter they give a livelier reflection to the sparkling log, great privileges to the story-teller. It is nature, in sooth, who creates story-tellers. Vainly are you a learned, grave writer, if you have not been born a story-teller, and you will never obtain the popularity of the Mysteries of Udolpho and the Shagreen Skin, the Arabian Nights, and Monsieur de Balzac. I have somewhere read that God created Adam, the nomenclator, saying to him: You are the story-teller. And what a story-teller! What verve and wit! What indefatigable perseverance in painting everything, daring everything, branding everything! How the world is dissected by this man! What an annalist! What passion and what coolness!
“The Philosophic Tales are the red-hot interpretation of a civilization ruined by debauch and well-being, which Monsieur de Balzac exposes in the pillory. The Arabian Nights are the complete history of the luxurious East in its days of happiness and perfumed dreams. Candide is the epitome of an epoch in which there were bastilles, a stag-park, and an absolute king. By thus taking at the first bound a place beside these formidable or graceful tale-tellers, Monsieur de Balzac proves one thing that remained to be proved; to wit, that the drama, which was no longer possible to-day on the stage, was still possible in the story — that our society, so dangerously sceptical, blase, and scornful, could yet be moved by the galvanic shocks of this poetry of the senses — full of life and colour, in flesh and blood, drunk with wine and lust — in which Monsieur de Balzac revels with such delight. Thus, the surprise was great, when, thanks to this story-teller, we still found among us something resembling poetry — feasts, intoxication, the light o’ love giving her caresses amidst an orgie, the brimming punch-bowl crowned with blue flames, the yellow-gloved politician, scented adultery, the girl indulging in pleasure and love and dreaming aloud, poverty clean and neat, surrounded with respectability and happy hazard — we have seen all this in Balzac. The Opera with its lemans, the pink boudoir and its flossy hangings, the feast and its surfeits; we have even seen Moliere’s doctor reappear, such need has this man of sarcasm and grotesqueness. The further you advance in the Shagreen Skin — vices, lost virtues, poverties, boredom, deep silence, dry-as-dust science, angular, witless scepticism, laughable egotism, puerile vanities, venal loves, Jewish second-hand dealers, etc. — the more astonished and pained you will be to recognize that the nineteenth century in which you live is so made up. The Shagreen Skin is Candide with Beranger’s notes; it is poverty, luxury, faith, mockery; it is the heartless breast, the brainless cranium of the nineteenth century — the century so bedizened and scented, so revolutionary, so ill-read, so little worth, the century of brilliant phantasmagorias, of which in fifty years’ time nothing will be seizable except Monsieur de Balzac’s Shagreen Skin.”