Project Gutenberg's The Girl with the Golden Eyes, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage

Release Date: March, 1999 [Etext #1659]
Posting Date: February 28, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Ellen Marriage

PREPARER'S NOTE: The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third part of a
trilogy. Part one is entitled Ferragus and part two is The Duchesse de
Langeais. The three stories are frequently combined under the title The
Thirteen.

DEDICATION

To Eugene Delacroix, Painter.

THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES

One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is,
surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace--a people fearful
to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual
turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop
of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to
be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces
give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with
which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of
weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of
hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of
a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few
observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its
cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages--youth and decay: youth,
wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at
this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection,
experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that
vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even
extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A
few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal
hue of