by Honoré de Balzac
Translated from the French by Clara Bell with Illustrations from the Furne Edition
“To the shame of the young be it said, good advice and warnings are never to seek.”
. . . on a coach ride between towns, a callow young man gets caught up in a round of tale-telling with his fellow passengers and ends up comitting an indiscretion that will take a lifetime to undo . . .
. . . in the town of Besançon, a cloistered young girl reads a romance penned by a mysterious newcomer and schemes to take the place of the story’s real-life inspiration: a beautiful Italian princess . . .
. . . two lovers stand in defiance of the age-old feud that has decimated their families; a vendetta that even Napoléon Bonaparte himself may be powerless to stop . . .
Beginning again in life, whether in one’s profession (as Balzac himself did on several occasions) or, to a lesser extent, for the purpose of concealing one’s identity, is the theme that unifies the three stories in this volume of The Human Comedy.
Version 1.0
$15/£10