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| Honore de Balzac, by Rodin |
Rodin was a revolutionary sculptor-artist.
Balzac was a revolutionary writer-artist.
During the time after the rein of TERROR, the changes were about then as now: MONEY and the worship of this commodity as though the exchange was greater than the works of masters such as, but not limited to, HONORE DE BALZAC.
AND although the time was revolutionary, the BELIEF system of having to be 'aristocrats' was applied. Balzac's mother was a 'gift' to his father, mother only 18 and father no younger than 50.
Balzac was abandoned and he was tortured in the old school of how to become a learned pupil for the establishment. He was in extremely ill health and this was a result of not being nurtured when he was born to the solitary confinement suffered from being put as a child into a place where the sun didn't shine. Sunshine is mandatory for a healthy human, most especially when being grown up from an infant to adult.
BALZAC would approve of my telling the truth about how this incredible artist - certainly the French can't be proud of how the legacy truly reads - was decidedly lesser than his debts. His debts were the result of writing about the history of the French during the time that human beings needed to have the real words for following a new idea to live.
How many artists did BALZAC influence? BALZAC is responsible for the IMAGE we accept as the CENTURY TWENTY ~ !
http://www.kiosek.com/dostoevsky/library/crimeandpunishment.txt
1866, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett,
CHAPTER_ONE, PART ONE >> ON AN exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her. This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but any one at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie- no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen. This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely aware of his fears. "I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles," he thought, with an odd smile. "Hm... yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.... But I am talking too much. It's because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I've learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking... of Jack the Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of that? Is that serious? It is not serious at all. It's simply a fantasy to amuse myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything."
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1680/1680.txt >> By Honore De Balzac, Translated by Clara Bell, DEDICATION To,
Mademoiselle Marie de Montheau ~AT THE SIGN OF THE CAT AND RACKET
Half-way down the Rue Saint-Denis, almost at the corner of the Rue du
Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful houses which
enable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy. The threatening
walls of this tumbledown abode seemed to have been decorated with
hieroglyphics. For what other name could the passer-by give to the Xs
and Vs which the horizontal or diagonal timbers traced on the front,
outlined by little parallel cracks in the plaster? It was evident that
every beam quivered in its mortices at the passing of the lightest
vehicle. This venerable structure was crowned by a triangular roof of
which no example will, ere long, be seen in Paris. This covering, warped
by the extremes of the Paris climate, projected three feet over the
roadway, as much to protect the threshold from the rainfall as to
shelter the wall of a loft and its sill-less dormer-window. This upper
story was built of planks, overlapping each other like slates, in order,
no doubt, not to overweight the frail house.
One rainy morning in the month of March, a young man, carefully wrapped
in his cloak, stood under the awning of a shop opposite this old house,
which he was studying with the enthusiasm of an antiquary. In point of
fact, this relic of the civic life of the sixteenth century offered
more than one problem to the consideration of an observer. Each story
presented some singularity; on the first floor four tall, narrow
windows, close together, were filled as to the lower panes with boards,
so as to produce the doubtful light by which a clever salesman can
ascribe to his goods the color his customers inquire for. The young man
seemed very scornful of this part of the house; his eyes had not yet
rested on it. The windows of the second floor, where the Venetian blinds
were drawn up, revealing little dingy muslin curtains behind the large
Bohemian glass panes, did not interest him either. His attention was
attracted to the third floor, to the modest sash-frames of wood, so
clumsily wrought that they might have found a place in the Museum of
Arts and Crafts to illustrate the early efforts of French carpentry.
These windows were glazed with small squares of glass so green that, but
for his good eyes, the young man could not have seen the blue-checked
cotton curtains which screened the mysteries of the room from profane
eyes. Now and then the watcher, weary of his fruitless contemplation,
or of the silence in which the house was buried, like the whole
neighborhood, dropped his eyes towards the lower regions. An involuntary
smile parted his lips each time he looked at the shop, where, in fact,
there were some laughable details.
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/classics/russian/courses-1/city
>> Thereafter he returned to literature and in 1829 published the first novel that he signed with his own name. This was Le Dernier Chouan (the title was changed in later editions to Les Chouans), a historical novel based on the Breton rebellion against the republican government in 1799. Balzac had undertaken careful research on the background, traveling to Britanny in order to ensure that his descriptions of the countryside and its inhabitants would be authentic. Since there was a vogue for historical novels, the book was well received. But real fame came to him 2 years later, when he published La Peau de chagrin, a semifantastic story in which the talismanic shagreen skin of the title is discovered to have the magical property of granting whatever wish the owner utters. Every time the skin is used in this way, however, it shrinks, and the young man who has acquired it knows that his own life-span contracts correspondingly. The tale thus becomes an allegory of the conflict between the will to enjoy and the will to survive, two principles which, according to Balzac, are utterly irreconcilable>> Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/honor-de-balzac#ixzz2b1AtFIvH.
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| Bird In Space, stone, C Brancusi |
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| C Brancusi |
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