The Project Gutenberg EBook of Honorine, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Honorine

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Clara Bell

Release Date: March, 1998 [Etext #1683]
Posting Date: February 28, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HONORINE ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

HONORINE

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Clara Bell

DEDICATION

To Monsieur Achille Deveria

An affectionate remembrance from the Author.

HONORINE

If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English
have a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps
sufficient reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be
found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of France
outside France. Other countries can show admirable scenery, and they
frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes but
slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a bewildering
magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither grace nor noble
manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for conversation, the
"Attic salt" so familiar at Paris, the prompt apprehension of what one
is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of the unspoken, which is half
the French language, is nowhere else to be met with. Hence a Frenchman,
whose raillery, as it is, finds so little comprehension, would wither
in a foreign land like an uprooted tree. Emigration is counter to the
instincts of the French nation. Many Frenchmen, of the kind here in
question, have owned to pleasure at seeing the custom-house officers
of their native land, which may seem the most daring hyperbole of
patriotism.

This preamble is intended to recall to such Frenchmen as have traveled
the extreme pleasure they have felt on occasionally finding their native
land, like an oasis, in the drawing-room of some diplomate: a pleasure
hard to be understood by those who have never left the asphalt of the
Boulevard des Italiens, and to whom the Quais of the left bank of the
Seine are not really Paris. To find Paris ag