Word: balzacs
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...world's great fiction traditions none is hardier than the encyclopedic chronicle of French national life. Honoré de Balzac's La Comedie Humaine was a procession of some 90 stories. Then came Emile Zola's 20-volume series of novels, Les Rougon-Macquart. Now Jules Romains' Men of Good Will, a study of French history and habits between 1908 and 1933, has reached its 13th and penultimate volume...
...down. But once upon a time respectable people like the Henry Adamses considered it beneath their dignity to speak to him, and Henry James, who knew him, dismissed him as a "tenth-rate cad." Nowadays his tomb in a Paris cemetery is said to draw more pilgrims than Balzac's or Chopin's. His name is as certain of immortality as that of Adams, James or the Venerable Bede...
...stairs, to the second-floor conference chamber, hobbled some two dozen venerable French "Immortals"-scholars with "glorious pasts and no futures." There, amid marble busts of bygone Academicians, they heard an earnest harangue from "Perpetual Secretary" Georges Duhamel. In its past the Academy had spurned Molière, Daudet, Balzac, Zola, many another great nonconformist; why not, demanded Novelist Duhamel, seize this magnificent occasion to elect such latter-day greats as Louis Aragon, Roger Martin du Gard, André Gide, André Malraux, Paul Claudel...
Reconversion. In Dublin, N.H., in the widely popular "Swoppers" column of the magazine Yankee, one advertiser offered the Harvard Classics for a shotgun, another the complete works of Balzac for a .22 automatic pistol...
...Although Balzac once described the population of Paris as a horrible-looking horde, thousands of Parisians like to look and smell nice at all times. They had tough going during the war. when the quality of lotions, dyes, perfumes and other cosmetics deteriorated. Now, with peace, they are faced with higher prices because of higher taxes...