The Jealousies of a Country Town
THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN BY HONORE DE BALZAC INTRODUCTION The two stories of /Les Rivalites/ are more closely connected than it was always Balzac's habit to connect the tales which he united under a common heading. Not only are both devoted to the society of Alencon--a town and neighborhood to which he had evidently strong, though it is not clearly known what, attractions--not only is the Chevalier de Valois a notable figure in each; but the community, imparted by the elaborate study of the old /noblesse/ in each case, is even greater
In the studio and amid the canvases upon which the young man had traced
the forms of his dreams, I have seen, piously placed in order on a
table, all the little papers written by his hand. A silent presence--I
was not then aware what manner of mind had there expressed
itself--revisiting this hearth: a mind surely made to travel far abroad
and cast its lights upon multitudes of men.
It was the mind of a complete artist, but of a poet as well, that had
lurked under the timid reserves of a youth who at thirteen years of age
had left school for the studio, and who had taught himself, without help
from any other, to translate the thoughts that moved him into such words
as the reader will judge of. Here are tenderness of heart, a fervent
love of Nature, a mystical sense of her changing moods and of her
eternal language: all those things of which the Germans, professing
themselves heirs of Goethe and of Beethoven, imagine they have the
monopoly, but of which we Frenchmen have the true perception, and which
move us in the words written by our young countryman for his most dearly
beloved and for himself.
It is singularly touching to find in the spiritual, grave, and religious
temper of these letters an affinity to the spirit of many others written
from the front. During those weeks, those endless months of winter in
the mud or the frost of the trenches, in the daily sight of death, in
the thought of that death coming upon them also, closing upon them to
seal their eyes for ever, these boys seem to have faced the things of
THE JEALOUSIES OF A COUNTRY TOWN BY HONORE DE BALZAC INTRODUCTION The two stories of /Les Rivalites/ are more closely connected than it was always Balzac's habit to connect the tales which he united under a common heading. Not only are both devoted to the society of Alencon--a town and neighborhood to which he had evidently strong, though it is not clearly known what, attractions--not only is the Chevalier de Valois a notable figure in each; but the community, imparted by the elaborate study of the old /noblesse/ in each case, is even greater