Word: balzac
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...great French storyteller Honore de Balzac could have written this tale of a Faustian bargain gone terribly wrong. In 1965 lawyer Andre-Francois Raffray agreed to "purchase" the house of an elderly client with $500-a-month installments, then a steep price--on condition that he would inherit the property outright the moment she died. Last week, 30 years older and $180,000 poorer, Raffray, 77, expired on Christmas Day. His client, Jeanne Calment, celebrated the holiday with a sumptuous hotel banquet in her hometown of Arles. "We all make bad deals in life," she joked to Raffray when...
...basis--besides, of course, the spectacle of a beloved celebrity on trial for murdering his wife in an unusually gruesome fashion--was the underlying portrait it painted of a particular time and place. Here was precisely the kind of teeming social canvas that the likes of Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Eliot and Flaubert used to such great effect. We met earthy Salvadoran maids, beadle-like cops, bumbling civil servants, stalwart limo drivers, beaten-down screenwriters manquas and, of course, comically obsequious houseguests. Occupying the top of the social pecking order in this modern-day Middlemarch was the defendant himself, living...
...party is in his honor. Phiberphest '95, they're calling it. Onstage is a band called Foamola, consisting of a bald male organist, a homeless man playing what appear to be a pair of rocks and a female vocalist who yowls, "When I read a book, I always read Balzac!/ When I take a drug, I always take Prozac!" Mercifully, an emcee named Jane Doe finally seizes the mike and asks, to the delight of the assembled digerati, "Just who the hell is Phiber Optik? A soft drink...
W.E.B. Du Bois expressed this idea better: "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not," Du Bois wrote. "Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in glided halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil...
...follow this, we need a two-semester class that moves to the modern period--something like a diluted English 10 combined with Government 1061. Doubtless, we'd have to include Dostoevsky, Balzac, Goethe and the Americans: Jefferson. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and DuBois. Perhaps, selections from Smith and Freud...