Balzac's Paris : The City as Human Comedy

Exploring Paris arm in arm with Balzac, nineteenth-century France?s most famous novelist and observer In Balzac?s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the first capital of the modern world. To this ageless city he makes a declaration of love in an accumulation of finely observed detail ? the cafés, landmarks, avenues, parks ? and captures the populace in countless meticulously drawn portraits: its lawyers, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators. Balzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. ?To saunter is a science,? he writes, ?it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.? Eric Hazan follows in Balzac?s footsteps, criss-crossing the city in the novelist?s outsize boots, running between printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistresses and friends, stopping for a moment, struck by a detail that would be fixed in Balzac?s photographic memory. More than a tour of the city, Balzac?s Paris is an attempt to measure the soul of a city as recovered in its finest literature.

Author: Eric Hazan

Publisher: Verso Books

Publication Date: Jun 25, 2024

Number of Pages: 209 pages

Language: English

Binding: Hardcover

ISBN-10: 1839767251

ISBN-13: 9781839767258