Word: balzac
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...days of Balzac and Galsworthy, the novel could legitimately deal with a businessman's success (through ambition and thrift) or with his failure (through greed, circumstance or the follies of love). A distinctly American contribution to the art of fiction is the discovery that success is failure. In the first 500 novels devoted to this notion, the unimpeachable moral that a man may lose his soul while making money proved reasonably arresting, but by now, the theme has become an overpowering bore and need no longer be written; it can be assembled from the fictioneer's clich...
...still part of every Baptist sermon, more and more Baptist preachers are university-trained. They read the classics, study foreign languages, keep informed on science. Richmond's Theodore Adams quotes Kierkegaard in his sermons; Pastor Blake Smith of the University Baptist Church of Austin, Texas likes to quote Balzac, while New Orleans' J. D. Grey is likely to make his points with tags from poets and philosophers...
...since the end of World War II and the antithesis of the tradition-bound European businessman. De Vitry (he does not use his title) began at the bottom at Pechiney, was decorated for fighting in the Resistance during the war, has made Pechiney's headquarters at 23 Rue Balzac in Paris as modern as his views about industry. "My motto," he says, "consists of two words: audacity and measure...
Self-interest, in La Rochefoucauld's view, was clearly the carrot that made men trot, as money was later singled out by Balzac, and sex by Freud. Yet, in obsessively concentrating on one human trait, as Author-Critic Louis Kronenberger points out in his new translation of the Maxims (Random House; $3.50), La Rochefoucauld narrowed his vision. Indeed, some of the maxims are strangely naive and platitudinous, suggesting once again that cynicism is sentimentality in reverse-and that, perhaps, the sheltered courtier could have learned from the crude common sense of the peasant. Yet at his best, as Kronenberger...
...hilarious cock-and-ball story. Like the fabliaux, the play is "mosts pour la gent faire rire"; it embodies the English version of l'esprit gaulois. Merry Wives certainly joins the company of the other classic representatives of the fabliau tradition--Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Balzac's Contes Drolatiques. So cease, ye carpers...