Word: balzacs
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Since Don Juan, however sinful, is most attractive character, many an author has used the legend. There are variants by Molière, Shadwell, Mozart, Mérimée Dumas père, Byron, Balzac, Shaw. Not overanxious to compete with such a talented gallery, yet fascinated by the violent Don, Sylvia Townsend Warner decided to take the matter up where the others had left off-with Don Juan's damnation. And so she wrote After the Death of Don Juan (Viking...
House of All Nations brings up to date the theme of Balzac's La Comedie Humaine. Our epoch, said Balzac, is one in which "money is the lawgiver, socially and .politically," when, for money, "people fight and?devour one another like spiders in a pot." Running to 795 pages, told in 104 cinematic scenes, House of All Nations takes for its pot the luxurious Paris private bank of Bertillon & Cie., described by its head, elegant, cynical, lucky, grandly deluded Jules Bertillon, as "a rich man's club: a gambling, deposit and tax-evasion bank ... a society dump" doing...
...copies of a two-volume novel translated from the French, forbiddingly titled The Thibaults. Its little-known writer was Roger Martin du Gard. The imposing boxed edition was made to look even less exciting by quotations from reviews that compared the book vaguely to the works of Balzac, Romain Rolland and Marcel Proust. Martin du Gard, said the New York Herald Tribune loftily, "reconciles at once the fastidious preciosity of Proust and Rolland's passionate evangelism with the traditional body of art." In a year when best sellers included Sorrell and Son, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Beau Geste, Martin...
...establishing his forms. Daumier had an extraordinary visual memory and a sculptor's grasp of three-dimensional movement. His famed drawings of lawyers, legislators, railway travelers, acrobats, street characters and bourgeois at home were done usually at night, under great journalistic pressure, without models or sketches. Although Balzac said Daumier had "Michelangelo under the skin," until 1860, when he was 52, he had scarcely any time to give to painting. When he was able to work in oils he went at it slowly using tentative outlines and building up his forms with wash after wash of semi-transparent color...
...library philosopher. Author Blum quotes sparingly from such pioneers of sex thought as Balzac, Rousseau, Stendhal, prefers his own sex data gathered "for years." Liveliest example of data-gathering by M. Blum, who "used to be very fond of following women," is his description of how in two hours before her train, a charming pickup gave him an insight into the "amorous unrest" of young brides. Later he learned she was the wife of an old college friend...