The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Duchesse de Langeais, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Duchesse de Langeais

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage

Release Date: March, 1996 [Etext #469]
Posting Date: February 20, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE DUCHESSE OF LANGEAIS

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Ellen Marriage

Preparer's Note:

The Duchesse of Langeais is the second part of a trilogy. Part
one is entitled Ferragus and part three is The Girl with the
Golden Eyes. The three stories are frequently combined under the
title The Thirteen.

To Franz Liszt

THE DUCHESSE OF LANGEAIS

In a Spanish city on an island in the Mediterranean, there stands a
convent of the Order of Barefoot Carmelites, where the rule instituted
by St. Theresa is still preserved with all the first rigor of the
reformation brought about by that illustrious woman. Extraordinary as
this may seem, it is none the less true. Almost every religious house
in the Peninsula, or in Europe for that matter, was either destroyed or
disorganized by the outbreak of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
wars; but as this island was protected through those times by the
English fleet, its wealthy convent and peaceable inhabitants were secure
from the general trouble and spoliation. The storms of many kinds which
shook the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century spent their
force before they reached those cliffs at so short a distance from the
coast of Andalusia.

If the rumour of the Emperor's name so much as reached the shore of the
island, it is doubtful whether the holy women kneeling in the cloisters
grasped the reality of his dream-like progress of glory, or the majesty
that blazed in flame across kingdom after kingdom during his meteor
life.

In the minds of the Roman Catholic world, the convent stood out
pre-eminent for a stern discipline which nothing had changed; the purity
of its rule had attracted unhappy women from the furthest parts of
Europe, women depr