Project Gutenberg's The Brotherhood of Consolation, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Brotherhood of Consolation

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: November, 1999 [Etext #1967]
Posting Date: March 6, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG 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. After gazing at the splendors of the Louvre we
can, by taking two steps, look down upon the rags and tatters of that
ignoble nest of houses huddling between the quai de la Tournelle and the
Hotel-Dieu,--a foul spot, which a modern municipality is endeavoring at
the present moment to remove.

In 1836 this marvellous scene presented still another lesson to the eye:
between the Parisian leaning on the parapet and the cathedral lay the
"Terrain" (such was the ancient name of this barren spot), still strewn
with the ruins of the Archiepiscopal Palace. When we contemplate from
that quay so many commemorating scenes, when the soul has grasped the
past as it does the present