Project Gutenberg's Scenes from a Courtesan's Life, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: James Waring

Release Date: March, 1999 [Etext #1660]
Posting Date: February 28, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCENES FROM A COURTESAN'S LIFE ***

Produced by Dagny, Bonnie Sala, and John Bickers

SCENES FROM A COURTESAN'S LIFE

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by James Waring

PREPARER'S NOTE: The story of Lucien de Rubempre begins in the
Lost Illusions trilogy which consists of Two Poets, A Distinguished
Provincial at Paris, and Eve and David. The action in Scenes From A
Courtesan's Life commences directly after the end of Eve and David.

DEDICATION

To His Highness
Prince Alfonso Serafino di Porcia.

Allow me to place your name at the beginning of an essentially
Parisian work, thought out in your house during these latter days.
Is it not natural that I should offer you the flowers of rhetoric
that blossomed in your garden, watered with the regrets I suffered
from home-sickness, which you soothed, as I wandered under the
boschetti whose elms reminded me of the Champs-Elysees? Thus,
perchance, may I expiate the crime of having dreamed of Paris
under the shadow of the Duomo, of having longed for our muddy
streets on the clean and elegant flagstones of Porta-Renza. When I
have some book to publish which may be dedicated to a Milanese
lady, I shall have the happiness of finding names already dear to
your old Italian romancers among those of women whom we love, and
to whose memory I would beg you to recall your sincerely
affectionate

DE BALZAC.
July 1838.

SCENES FROM A COURTESAN'S LIFE

ESTHER HAPPY; OR, HOW A COURTESAN CAN LOVE

In 1824, at the last opera ball of the season, several masks were
struck by the beauty of a youth who was wandering about the passages
and greenroom with the air of a man in search of a woman kept at home