Honoré de Balzac: Le Père Goriot

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, best known for his series of novels called La Comédie humaine, in which he depictured life in France after the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. It was divided into: Scenes from private life, Scenes from provincial life, Scenes from Parisian life, Scenes from political life, Scenes from military life, Scenes from country life, Philosophical studies and Analytical studies.

Le Père Goriot, written in 1835, belongs to Scenes from private life, although, at first, the writer had put it in Scenes from Parisian life. In this novel, there’re characters that recurr in his other novels, such as, for example, Eugène de Rastignac, Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin (The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans) and Baron de Nucingen (La Maicon Nucingen).

The idea of the story is similar to Shakespeare’s King Lear. It’s about Jean-Joachim Goriot, a former vermicelli-maker, who gets poor from too much fatherly love towards his spoilt and greedy daughters, Anastasie de Restaud and Delphine de Nucingen and is forced to live in a boarding-house owned by Madame Vauquer. In the boarding-house, among others, live Eugène de Rastignac, an impoverished nobleman and law student, who’s trying to establish himself in a high society (In French, the word Rastignac, has been used as the term for a social climber.) and Vautrin, an escaped convict and latent homosexual (this is more obvious in The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans). It was said that ex-criminal, who’d later become policeman, Eugène François Vidocq was the model which inspired Balzac for the character of Vautrin.

In my opinion, the most crucial moment, as well as the most powerful one, is when Madame de Beauséant is “teaching” her cousin, de Rastignac how to deal with people on his way up in society. In short, she advises him to be cold and calculating, to use people, men and women equally, and to leave them when they accomplished their tasks. Most of all, he should find a young, wealthy, rich and stylish woman to open the "right doors" for him. However, all the way through, he must learn to hide his feelings, otherwise he’ll be ruined.

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French literary icon Sagan dies

Best-selling French novelist Francoise Sagan has died in the north-western town of Honfleur aged 69.

She died of heart and lung failure a few days after being admitted to a local hospital.

Sagan published her first and best-known work Bonjour Tristesse - an anthem to disillusioned youth - in 1954 at the age of just 18.

She produced more than 40 novels and plays, including A Certain Smile, Incidental Music and The Painted Lady.

She had been ill for several years and was taken to the hospital earlier this week, hospital officials said.

With her passing, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive authors
President Jacques Chirac

She had been staying in the Normandy town of Honfleur, and passed away with a close friend and her son by her side, a hospital official told French radio.

French President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin immediately paid her emotional tributes.

Mr Chirac called Sagan "a leading figure in her generation" who helped raise the status of women in France.

"With her passing, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive authors...

"With finesse, emotion and subtlety, Francoise Sagan explored the spirit and passions of the human heart," he said in a statement issued by his office.

Mr Raffarin called Sagan "a smile - one that was melancholy, enigmatic, distant, and yet joyous".

Early literary success

Sagan was born into a wealthy family in the south-west of France in 1935.

She was expelled from her convent school and took seven weeks in the summer of 1953 to write her most important work.

She was the archetype of the teenage rebel in a post-war Paris abuzz with jazz and existentialism, says correspondent Hugh Schofield in Paris.

Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) tells the story of a bored, bourgeois teenager who filled the emptiness of her existence by conspiring to destroy her father's new girlfriend.

It was about adolescence, love and loneliness, and it had an immediate echo in a world looking for new ways of expressing emotion and human identity, Hugh Schofield says.

The novel gained instant success because of its irreverent tone and was considered at the time shocking because of the emotional intimacy and subversive subtext.

It was later translated into 22 languages and sold five million copies around the world.

Later in her life, Sagan proved just as controversial, collecting a number of convictions for tax fraud and drug abuse. She was also known for her love of gambling and fast cars.

"The laws are made to be adapted to people and not the other way round. I have always advised everyone against cocaine," she said at the time of one of the convictions.

::source: http://classic-literature.blogspot.com/

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