The Elixir of Life
()
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.
Read more from Honoré De Balzac
Perfect Love, Emotional Romance: A Heartwarming Collection of 100 Classic Poems and Letters for the Lovers (Valentine's Day 2019 Edition) Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/550 Great Love Letters You Have To Read (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Collected Works of Honore de Balzac. Illustrated: The Complete Human Comedy, Father Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Cousin Betty and others Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLost Illusions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Droll Stories Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Cousin Bette Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Woman of Thirty Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Treatise on Elegant Living Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Athiest's Mass Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSarrasine: Bilingual Edition (English – French) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCousin Bette (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Short Stories (Dual-Language) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chouans Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Related to The Elixir of Life
Related ebooks
The Elixir of Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPetty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThrough the Magic Door Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Opportune Moment, 1855: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Book of Ballads, edited by Bon Gaultier [pseud.] Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMince Pie Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Delicious Vice Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPipefuls Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn a Green Shade: A Country Commentary Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Physiology of Marriage, Part 1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Physiology of Marriage Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Certain Hour (Dizain des Poëtes) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrankenstein Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA History of Story-telling: Studies in the development of narrative Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrankenstein (Deluxe Edition) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Physiology of Marriage, Complete Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Disturbing Charm Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Hope of the Katzekopfs Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNuts and Nutcrackers Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Top 10 Short Stories - Nathaniel Hawthorne Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Exemplary Novels of Cervantes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStudies And Essays: “the biggest tragedy of life is the utter impossibility to change what you have done” Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Volume 62, No. 386, December, 1847 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Certain Hour (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThrough The Magic Door: "The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless." Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Classic Gothic Horror Anthology Volume I: Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOn the Vice of Novel Reading. Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Collected Works of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: The Complete Works PergamonMedia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Reviews for The Elixir of Life
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Elixir of Life - Honoré de Balzac
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Elixir of Life, by Honore de Balzac
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Elixir of Life
Author: Honore de Balzac
Translator: Clara Bell and James Waring
Release Date: February, 1998 [Etext #1215]
Posting Date: February 20, 2010
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ELIXIR OF LIFE ***
Produced by Dagny
THE ELIXIR OF LIFE
By Honore De Balzac
Translated By Clara Bell and James Waring
TO THE READER
At the very outset of the writer's literary career, a friend, long since dead, gave him the subject of this Study. Later on he found the same story in a collection published about the beginning of the present century. To the best of his belief, it is some stray fancy of the brain of Hoffmann of Berlin; probably it appeared in some German almanac, and was omitted in the published editions of his collected works. The Comedie Humaine is sufficiently rich in original creations for the author to own to this innocent piece of plagiarism; when, like the worthy La Fontaine, he has told unwittingly, and after his own fashion, a tale already related by another. This is not one of the hoaxes in vogue in the year 1830, when every author wrote his tale of horror
for the amusement of young ladies. When you have read the account of Don Juan's decorous parricide, try to picture to yourself the part which would be played under very similar circumstances by honest folk who, in this nineteenth century, will take a man's money and undertake to pay him a life annuity on the faith of a chill, or let a house to an ancient lady for the term of her natural life! Would they be for resuscitating their clients? I should dearly like a connoisseur in consciences to consider how far there is a resemblance between a Don Juan and fathers who marry their children to great expectations. Does humanity, which, according to certain philosophers, is making progress, look on the art of waiting for dead men's shoes as a step in the right direction? To this art we owe several honorable professions, which open up ways of living on death. There are people who rely entirely on an expected demise; who brood over it, crouching each morning upon a corpse, that serves again for their pillow at night. To this class belong bishops' coadjutors, cardinals' supernumeraries, tontiniers, and the like. Add to the list many delicately scrupulous persons eager to buy landed property beyond their means, who calculate with dry logic and in cold blood the probable duration of the life of a father or of a step-mother, some old man or woman of eighty or ninety, saying to themselves, I shall be sure to come in for it in three years' time, and then——
A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life. Then what must it be to live when every moment of your life is tainted with murder? And have we not just admitted that a host of human creatures in our midst are led by our laws, customs, and usages to dwell without ceasing on a fellow-creature's death? There are men who put the weight of