Word: balzac
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Balzac was a cross between a babbitt and a stroke of lightning. Above his pudgy face, lighted by a bulbous nose, his brain was a melting pot for furious fancies. It fumed with a thousand energetic inspirations which varied from running a printing press to writing the Comedie Humaine. Everything he did was characterized by a gigantic and exaggerated gusto. At dinner with George Sand "three bottles had been emptied. He pointed to them: 'We are not drinking!' After they had consumed six dozen oysters, he pointed to the shells: 'What's wrong with you all tonight? Does nobody feel...
...Balzac wrote the story. E. Fabre made a play out of it. P. Potter put it into English. O. (Otis) Skinner makes it presentable in Manhattan today. Mr. Skinner wears the same faded regimentals that he sported 19 years ago; he is the same swaggering bon-vivant of a Napoleonic colonel with the old flourishes. The flourishes satisfy, but the plot leaves a stale taste. In a curtain speech after the third act, Mr. Skinner smilingly reveals his intention of reviving the play again in 1946. Actor Skinner will...
...present volume is by no such glutton, but by his contemporary gourmand, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, perhaps the most refined, curious and diverting commentator upon taste who ever lived. Balzac did him the honor to model his own Physiology of Marriage upon the Physiology of Taste of Brillat-Savarin. An unabridged translation of the latter work, on the 100th anniversary of the death of Brillat-Savarin, with an introduction by fastidious Editor Frank Crowninshield of Vanity Fair, is by way of being a delicate effort to elevate U. S. civilization...
Talk is and that exact concerning one French writer, hight Balzac, namely: he used to stay up late at night writing pot boilers, immersed in smoke, eclipsed by coffee. Perhaps "La Menage de Garcon" was one of the potboilers. One of the better potboilers. One cannot be sure when he sees the novel through at least three mediums plus Otis Skinner. "The Honor of the Family", born a bon mot, dies a cliche. One must, however, respect the dead. Mr. Skinner, Miss Jessie Royce Landis are very kind pall-bearers. But why the funeral...
...death of her asthmatic daughter-shallow and caddish Painter Thomas Lawrence being lugged in to emphasize the inferiority of the Siddons-Kemble strain. The one study that comes off concerns a brilliant young French historian who mastered life, and then frittered it away, by emulating a character in Balzac-a rebuffed suitor who paused on the threshold, returned to the assault...