The Human Comedy - Volume 07. Scenes of Provincial Life - Part 03

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

Rating 4.5
Word count
1.2M words
Chapters
120

Tags

Foreign Literature World Classics Social ObservationPortrait GalleryHuman ComedyComplex HumanityMoral DilemmaSatirical StyleWealth Stories19th CenturyProvincial LifeFrench Society

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.La Comédie humaine - Volume 07. Scènes de la vie de Province - Tome 03 by BalzacAuthor: Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850,Language: French, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Aug 18, 2016

Editor's review

This is the original French e-book of Volume 7 of Balzac's La Comédie humaine, containing Tome 3 of Scènes de la vie de Province, released free by Project Gutenberg. For Chinese readers, its value lies not in reading it straight through for plot but in treating it as primary material for studying Balzac's overall architecture and his provincial narratives: this part belongs to Scènes de la vie de Province, the same observational system as celebrated works like Eugénie Grandet, and helps readers understand how Balzac assembled a panorama of nineteenth-century French society across different volumes. The electronic text is easy to search for names, places, and keywords, making it suitable for close reading, textual comparison, or long-form reading practice in French study. Reading it requires some French and prior familiarity with the overall structure of La Comédie humaine; otherwise one can easily get lost among characters and volumes. It is best used as research reading rather than casual reading.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the general preface and volume outline of La Comédie humaine first to clarify this volume's place among the provincial scenes before entering the text
  2. Do search-based reading using characters and places as clues, with notes to sort out recurring characters across volumes
  3. Set a daily limit for close reading; when encountering long sentences, mark the structure first and reread, avoiding word-by-word plodding

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.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this e-book a Chinese translation? No. The metadata shows the language is French; it is the original French e-book released by Project Gutenberg, suitable for reading the original directly or for textual research, not for use as a Chinese translation.
Can I read this without having read other volumes of La Comédie humaine? You can, but understanding will be limited. This is Tome 3 of Scènes de la vie de Province, and its characters and themes are interlinked with other volumes. It is advisable to first understand the overall classificatory framework of La Comédie humaine, then enter this volume, paying attention to how characters echo across different volumes.
Is this book suitable for learning French? It suits advanced learners with some foundation who want long-form close reading. Nineteenth-century French has many long sentences and old-fashioned expressions, which can frustrate beginners. Use annotated editions or introductory materials and treat it as close-reading training rather than a beginner's primer.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

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.