The Project Gutenberg EBook of Domestic Peace, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Domestic Peace

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell

Release Date: August, 1998 [Etext #1411]
Posting Date: February 24, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOMESTIC PEACE ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

DOMESTIC PEACE

By Honore De Balzac

Translated By Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell

Dedicated to my dear niece Valentine Surville.

DOMESTIC PEACE

The incident recorded in this sketch took place towards the end of the
month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleon's fugitive empire
attained the apogee of its splendor. The trumpet-blasts of Wagram were
still sounding an echo in the heart of the Austrian monarchy. Peace was
being signed between France and the Coalition. Kings and princes came to
perform their orbits, like stars, round Napoleon, who gave himself the
pleasure of dragging all Europe in his train--a magnificent
experiment in the power he afterwards displayed at Dresden. Never, as
contemporaries tell us, did Paris see entertainments more superb than
those which preceded and followed the sovereign's marriage with an
Austrian archduchess. Never, in the most splendid days of the Monarchy,
had so many crowned heads thronged the shores of the Seine, never
had the French aristocracy been so rich or so splendid. The diamonds
lavishly scattered over the women's dresses, and the gold and silver
embroidery on the uniforms contrasted so strongly with the penury of the
Republic, that the wealth of the globe seemed to be rolling through the
drawing-rooms of Paris. Intoxication seemed to have turned the brains
of this Empire of a day. All the military, not excepting their chief,
reveled like parvenus in the treasure conquered for them by a million
men with worsted epaulettes, whose demands were satisfied by a few yards
of red ribbon.

At this time most women affected that lightness of conduct and facility
of morals which distinguished the reign of Louis XV. Whether it were in
imitation of the tone of the fallen monarchy, or because