Word: balzac
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Garbo had picked not only the location but the story, one of her favorites, Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais. Set in the milieu of a decadent French nobility, it was a passion-tossed tale of a tragic love that would cast Garbo as a worldly duchess who finally takes a nun's vows and dies at 29. Scripter Sally Benson had made the adaptation; Wanger was trying to wangle British Cinemactor James Mason into the male lead as a steel-willed marquis...
...hangman slightly bored by his job, in dissecting egotists and connivers. One of her better novels, House of All Nations, was a long, superbly documented description of the world of high finance, which viciously satirized the European big money and led some critics to compare her, rather prematurely, to Balzac...
...been the least bit peculiar, at that. Germany's Schiller whetted his inspiration by keeping rotten apples in his writing table drawer. Charlotte Brontë often mooned about the house for months without being able to put pen to paper. Milton could write only between October and March; Balzac, Byron, Dostoevsky and Conrad, only at night...
...blown-up, pretentious oils had never commanded anything like the critical praise accorded his classic black-&-white illustrations for Rabelais, Coleridge, Balzac, Dante, Cervantes and the Bible. His paintings were blandly ignored by 19th Century Paris, but Doré managed to sell the whole lot of them to an English dealer for $300,000. They were more to the taste of Victorian London. Queen Victoria bought a few herself, and for 21 years a Bond Street gallery exhibited the rest. Shipped to the U.S., the paintings were valued at $1,000,000 and viewed by over a million people...
...lawyer and big-game hunter, offered $12,500 for the lot. The auctioneer promptly canceled all previous bids in favor of Holzworth's and shut up shop. But next day Gustave Doré's paintings were still gathering grime in the warehouse. As a final twist, which Balzac might have appreciated, Collector Holzworth was arrested, charged with passing phony checks...