The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Drama on the Seashore, 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: A Drama on the Seashore

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: August, 1998 [Etext #1427]
Posting Date: February 24, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DRAMA ON THE SEASHORE ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

A DRAMA ON THE SEASHORE

By Honore De Balzac

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To Madame la Princesse Caroline Galitzin de Genthod, nee Comtesse
Walewska. Homage and remembrances of

The Author.

A DRAMA ON THE SEASHORE

Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in measuring
the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the angle at
which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of the inner
life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which for all men lies
between twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of great thoughts, of
fresh conceptions, because it is the age of immense desires. After that
age, short as the seed-time, comes that of execution. There are, as it
were, two youths,--the youth of belief, the youth of action; these are
often commingled in men whom Nature has favored and who, like Caesar,
like Newton, like Bonaparte, are the greatest among great men.

I was measuring how long a time it might take a thought to develop.
Compass in hand, standing on a rock some hundred fathoms above the
ocean, the waves of which were breaking on the reef below, I surveyed my
future, filling it with books as an engineer or builder traces on vacant
ground a palace or a fort.

The sea was beautiful; I had just dressed after bathing; and I awaited
Pauline, who was also bathing, in a granite cove floored with fine
sand, the most coquettish bath-room that Nature ever devised for her
water-fairies. The spot was at the farther end of Croisic, a dainty
little peninsula in Brittany; it was far from the port, and so
inaccessible that the coast-guard seldom thought it necessary to pass
that way. To float in ether after flo