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EBOOK THE BROTHERHOOD OF CONSOLATION ***
Produced by John Bickers and Dagny
THE BROTHERHOOD OF CONSOLATION
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley
FIRST EPISODE
MADAME DE LA CHANTERIE
I
THE MALADY OF THE AGE
On a fine evening in the month of September, 1836, a man about thirty
years of age was leaning on the parapet of that quay from which a
spectator can look up the Seine from the Jardin des Plantes to
Notre-Dame, and down, along the vast perspective of the river, to the
Louvre. There is not another point of view to compare with it in the
capital of ideas. We feel ourselves on the quarter-deck, as it were,
of a gigantic vessel. We dream of Paris from the days of the Romans to
those of the Franks, from the Normans to the Burgundians, the
Middle-Ages, the Valois, Henri IV., Louis XIV., Napoleon, and
Louis-Philippe. Vestiges are before us of all those sovereignties, in
monuments that recall their memory. The cupola of Sainte-Genevieve
towers above the Latin quarter. Behind us rises the noble apsis of the
cathedral. The Hotel de Ville tells of revolutions; the Hotel-Dieu, of
the miseries of Paris.
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