Honoré de Balzac

La Cousine Bette (Cousin Bette) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th-century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and torment a series of men. One of these is Baron Hector Hulot, husband to Bette's cousin Adeline. He sacrifices his family's fortune and good name to please...

Illustrated with beautiful chapter headings that match the book cover! This short novel, part of the Scenes of Private Life section of Honoré de Balzac's vast masterpiece The Human Comedy, includes the first appearances of key characters who return later in the series. A Daughter of Eve is a tale in which seemingly innocent peccadilloes soon spiral into an inescapable web of intrigue, fraud, and lust. As part of our mission to publish great...

Honoré De Balzac (1799-1850) is generally credited as the inventor of the modern realistic novel. In more than ninety novels, he set forth French society and life as he saw it. He created a cast of over two thousand individual and identifiable characters, some of whom reappear in different novels. He organized his works into his masterpiece, La Comedie Humaine,which was the final result of his attempt to grasp the whole of society...

This is one of Balzac's fantastic reality tales, not only resounding in the supernatural and the occult, in diabolical elixirs, eternal life or in a piece of the conscious body that returns to the life of a corpse. There is a sharp criticism against some ways of the living of the bourgeoisie and especially on the institution of the Catholic Church.

Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honoré de Balzac. Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley libreka classics — These are classics of literary history, reissued and made available to a wide audience. Immerse yourself in well-known and popular titles!

Though a relatively short story, "A Man of Business" is an important component of Honoré de Balzac's vast story cycle The Human Comedy, involving many of the recurring characters from the series and tying up a number of loose ends. As a fete thrown at the home of his mistress begins to wind down, Cardot invites the lingering merrymakers to settle around the table and begins telling a story about a clever debt-collection scheme. As part of our mission...

Louis Lambert is an 1832 novel by French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799—1850), included in the Études philosophiques section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set mostly in a school at Vendme, it examines the life and theories of a boy genius fascinated by the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg (1688—1772).

Une édition de référence d'Eugénie Grandet de Honoré de Balzac, spécialement conçue pour la lecture sur les supports numériques. « En toute situation, les femmes ont plus de causes de douleur que n'en a l'homme, et souffrent plus que lui. L'homme a sa force, et l'exercice de sa puissance : il agit, il va, il s'occupe, il pense, il embrasse l'avenir et y trouve des consolations. Ainsi faisait Charles. Mais la femme demeure, elle reste face...

The first part of Modeste Mignon is based on a traditional species of folktale known as La fille mal gardée ("The Ill-Watched Girl"), in which a young woman takes a lover despite the close attentions of her guardians, who are determined to preserve her chastity for a more suitable match. Modeste Mignon, a young provincial woman of romantic temperament, imagines herself to be in love with the famous Parisian poet Melchior de Canalis, whose works have...

libreka classics — These are classics of literary history, reissued and made available to a wide audience. Immerse yourself in well-known and popular titles!