Word: balzac
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Only for one brief moment, in the 1840s, does Sennett view the public and private as inseparable: in his novels, Balzac wrote physical descriptions of his characters' appearances that revealed both their psychological make-up and social class. "The web of details" in Balzac's Paris, Sennett writes, "is constructed such that general forces have a meaning only as they can be reflected in individual cases." But instead of showing the gradual dominance of personality in the public realm, Sennett shifts the scene abruptly--to the concert hall where Paganini made his violin performances more riveting than the music itself...
Tales of George Sand's amours with Liszt, Heine, Balzac and Flaubert are also dismissed as apocryphal. With the record thus cleared, Biographer Cate dramatically details the involvements that his scholarship can verify-including affairs with Prosper Mérimeée, Alfred de Musset, Frédéric Chopin, one Italian surgeon, two French lawyers and an international assortment of young men who entered Sand's household as tutors for her two children, Maurice and Solange...
Galley Slave. Sand's professional labors were at least as arduous as her love life. Like Balzac, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, she was one of the galley slaves of 19th century literature, constantly trying to keep one pen stroke ahead of her creditors. The result was some 60 novels, 25 plays, an autobiography and enough miscellaneous essays to fill a dozen bulging volumes. Her correspondence, which is still being uncovered, promises to fill another 25 volumes. An impassioned propagandist for the romantic movement, she used her writing to champion political as well as sexual revolution...
...Cate occasionally overstates his case, he does not stack the evidence. All the pieces of the puzzle are there. The reader must put it together if he wants to find the answer to Balzac's potentially prophetic question: "What will become of the world when all women are like George Sand...
Hirshhorn's instinct for painting seems to have been weaker than for sculpture. There, nobody could cavil at the major works he has supplied Washington-the Giacomettis, the Daumiers, at least some of the 15 Moores, Rodin's Burghers of Calais and stupendous Balzac, Picasso's Baby Carriage, and the great series of Matisse's Backs of a Woman, to name only...