Facino Cane

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.7

Word count: 30K words
Chapters: 3

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Facino Cane by Honoré de BalzacAuthor: Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850,Language: English, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Sep 22, 2004

Editor's review

"Facino Cane" is a short story by Balzac within the framework of La Comédie Humaine. It is brief, yet it typically embodies his fascination with desire, observation, and the narrator's perspective. The story unfolds in the first person: the narrator, in the everyday setting of Paris, encounters an old man of strange background and near-blindness, and from this encounter is drawn a recollection of Venice, aristocratic fate, and dreams of wealth. Its value lies not in complexity of plot but in how Balzac uses a minimal scene to accomplish a glimpse across class lines: a fallen man's account of past glory is both a personal tragedy and a microcosm of the themes of social mobility and ambition. In reading, it is worth noting the narrator's position—he is both listener and observer and transmitter, and this layered mode of telling keeps the truth perpetually ambiguous. This edition is the English electronic text of the Gutenberg Project, with a markedly nineteenth-century style, suitable as reading material for English literature or as supplementary text for Balzac studies. It is suited to being read through in one sitting in a quiet setting; on returning to the opening description of the old man's appearance and manner, many foreshadowings will be found.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who wish to enter Balzac through a short story and understand the themes of La Comédie Humaine
Readers interested in nineteenth-century French literature and realist narrative
Literature students who need an English short story as supplementary course material
Readers who enjoy observational narration and are curious about the reliability of the narrator

Not a good fit for

Readers seeking strong plot conflict and fast-paced stories
Readers unaccustomed to nineteenth-century English syntax who prefer contemporary plain prose
Readers who only want a Chinese translation and will not accept the English original

Reading tips

Read through once to grasp the outline of the story, then return to the opening description of the old man's appearance and appreciate the placement of foreshadowing.
While reading, mark the narrator's judgments and guesses, distinguishing what he sees from what he infers.
After finishing, compare with other Balzac short stories and observe the recurring themes of ambition and recollection.
The English text has many long sentences; reading in sections is advised, and on encountering unfamiliar words, first infer from context and then verify.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

To which series of Balzac's works does this story belong?

"Facino Cane" is generally classified within Balzac's La Comédie Humaine, among the works presented in short-story form. Like many pieces in La Comédie Humaine, it concerns individual desire, social class, and turns of fate, but it is short and structurally more like a concentrated narrative experiment than a multi-stranded long novel.

Can I read this Gutenberg edition if my English is not good?

This edition is a nineteenth-century English text with rather long sentences and some vocabulary uncommon today. If your English reading foundation is average, it is advisable first to read a Chinese translation to understand the plot, then return to the English text for comparative reading; you can also divide the text into several sections and handle only one scene at a time, reducing the burden of long sentences.

What is the core appeal of the story?

The core appeal lies in the mode of narration: a Parisian bystander meets a fallen old man and hears him tell of Venice's past and dreams of wealth. The story has no dense events but advances through layers of telling, making the reader constantly doubt the credibility of both the narrator and the speaker; this ambiguity is precisely the interest of Balzac's short stories.

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About the author

Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850 Author

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a French novelist best known for his vast series La Comédie humaine. The library holds 143 of his works, including Father Goriot, Lost Illusions, Eugénie Grandet, and several volumes of La Comédie humaine. His writing is distinguished by dense detail, a large cast of characters, and an intricate social network, often linking separate works through recurring figures to portray nineteenth-century French society. He excelled at depicting the power of desire, ambition, and money through precise settings and strong narrative tension, and he exerted a lasting influence on later realist fiction. Beyond the broad outline of his life, public information is limited, so this note focuses on the themes and style of his works.