As for
trees, only one, a walnut, managed, by dint of perpetual acrobatism,
to conserve a stable equilibrium.
Most of the fiction published by Balzac in 1839--_A Provincial Great
Man in Paris_, the _Secrets of the Princess de Cadignan_, and the
_Village Cure_--was written with great verve, and may be classed in
the list of his important work. The second of the three just
mentioned, which is the shortest, gives us the story of a woman who,
after losing her fourteenth lover, succeeds in getting a fifteenth,
d'Arthez, to believe her virtuous and a sort of saint maligned by
envy. There is cleverness and to spare in the way the wiles of this
sly jade are related, and falsehood shown as a fine art in the service
of passional love. Balzac was thoroughly at home in treating such a
theme. Both d'Arthez and the Princess are prominent characters in
certain others of his books. The former appears in the _Provincial
Great Man in Paris_, which the author calls an audacious and
frightfully exact painting of the inner morals of the French capital.
It formed a sequel to a previously published short novel, the _Two
Poets_, and made part of a still larger series united under the title
_Lost Illusions_, the entire work being completed in the Forties with
_Splendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans_, this last portion having
also more than one section.
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