Vendetta

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

3.7

Word count: 144K words
Chapters: 15

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.Vendetta by Honoré de BalzacAuthor: Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850,Language: English, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Oct 28, 2005

Editor's review

Vendetta is one of Balzac's shorter works, included in the Human Comedy cycle, built around a Corsican theme of vengeance and marked by strong dramatic and moral tension. The story pivots on the will to revenge, portraying how a character consumed by hatred wears himself down through long waiting and action, while also reflecting Balzac's enduring attention to family honor, social class, and human nature. It is short in length with a concentrated plot, making it a good introductory text for understanding Balzac's non-Parisian subjects. This edition is the Project Gutenberg English electronic version, in the public domain and free, convenient for searching and citing the original text. While reading, note how the narrative rhythm works with the psychological portrayal of characters, and how the theme of revenge was handled in nineteenth-century French literature. If you have already read Old Goriot or Eugénie Grandet, this book offers another, colder and more concentrated side of Balzac.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers new to Balzac's shorter fiction who prefer a tight plot
Readers interested in the revenge motif and nineteenth-century French literature
Students needing a public-domain English electronic text for classroom reading or quotation
Readers who enjoy discussing family honor and the cost to human nature

Not a good fit for

Balzac readers expecting a long social panorama with complex multi-threaded narrative
Readers unaccustomed to the feel and sentence structure of nineteenth-century English translations
Readers who only want a Chinese translation and would rather not deal with the English original

Reading tips

Read through once to grasp the main line of revenge, then revisit the psychological portrayal at key turning points.
Jot down as you read how the motive for revenge and its cost change, to help sort out the theme afterward.
Compare with other Balzac short stories to see how he handles family and honor themes differently.
For classroom use, consider selecting the climactic passages and discussing whether the narrator's stance is neutral.

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

What kind of work is this Vendetta by Balzac?

It is a short story by Balzac, one piece in his Human Comedy cycle, with a theme built around revenge. It is short in length with a concentrated plot, and compared with long social-panorama works such as Old Goriot it is colder and more focused on the drive of a single will.

Is the Gutenberg edition in Chinese or English? Is it suitable for reading directly?

This edition is an English electronic version, in the public domain and free. If you have some foundation in English reading, you can read it directly; if you are more used to Chinese, it is advisable to find a Chinese translation for comparison first, or to use this book as intensive reading material in the English original.

Do I need to understand the Human Comedy as a whole before reading?

Not necessarily. This book can be read independently and does not depend on the plots of other pieces. If you want to understand its place in Balzac's work, you can briefly learn about the classification framework of the Human Comedy afterward, and then the book's theme will be clearer on review.

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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.