Honorine

Honorine, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Honorine
Author: Honore de Balzac
Release Date: December 10, 2006 [EBook #1683]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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HONORINE ***

Produced by Dagny, and John Bickers

HONORINE
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Clara Bell

DEDICATION
To Monsieur Achille Deveria
An affectionate remembrance from the Author.

HONORINE

If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English have
a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps sufficient
reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be found;
whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of France outside
France. Other countries can show admirable scenery, and they
frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes but
slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a bewildering
magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither grace nor noble
manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for conversation, the "Attic
salt" so familiar at Paris, the prompt apprehension of what one is
thinking, but does not say, the spirit of the unspoken, which is half the
French language, is nowhere else to be met with. Hence a Frenchman,
whose raillery, as it is, finds so little comprehension, would wither in a
foreign land like an uprooted tree. Emigration is counter to the instincts
of the French nation. Many Frenchmen, of the kind here in question,
have owned to pleasure at seeing the custom-house officers of their
native land, which may seem the most daring hyperbole of patriotism.
This preamble is intended to recall to such Frenchmen as have traveled
the extreme pleasure they have felt on occasionally finding their native
land, like an oasis, in the drawing-room of some diplomate: a pleasure
hard to be understood by those who have never left the asphalt of the
Boulevard des Italiens, and to whom the Quais of the left bank of the
Seine are not really Paris. To find Paris again! Do you know what that

means, O Parisians? It is to find--not indeed the cookery of the Rocher
de Cancale as Borel elaborates it for those who can appreciate it, for
that exists only in the Rue Montorgueil--but a meal which reminds you
of it! It is to find the wines of France, which out of France are to be
regarded as myths, and as rare as the woman of whom I write! It is to
find--not the most fashionable pleasantry, for it loses its aroma between
Paris and the frontier--but the witty understanding, the critical
atmosphere in which the French live, from the poet down to the artisan,
from the duchess to the boy in the street.
In 1836, when the Sardinian Court was residing at Genoa, two
Parisians, more or less famous, could fancy themselves still in Paris
when they found themselves in a palazzo, taken by the French
Consul-General, on the hill forming the last fold of the Apennines
between the gate of San Tomaso and the well-known lighthouse, which
is to be seen in all the keepsake views of Genoa. This palazzo is one of
the magnificent villas on which Genoese nobles were wont to spend
millions at the time when the aristocratic republic was a power.
If the early night is beautiful anywhere, it surely is at Genoa, after it has
rained as it can rain there, in torrents, all the morning; when the
clearness of the sea vies with that of the sky; when silence reigns on the
quay and in the groves of the villa, and over the marble heads with
yawning jaws, from which water mysteriously flows; when the stars are
beaming; when the waves of the Mediterranean lap one after another
like the avowal of a woman, from whom you drag it word by word. It
must be confessed, that the moment when the perfumed air brings
fragrance to the lungs and to our day-dreams; when voluptuousness,
made visible and ambient as the air, holds you in your easy-chair; when,
a spoon in your hand, you sip an ice or a sorbet, the town at your feet
and fair woman opposite--such Boccaccio hours can be known only in
Italy and on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Imagine to yourself, round the table, the Marquis di Negro, a knight
hospitaller to all men of talent on their travels, and the Marquis
Damaso Pareto, two Frenchmen disguised as Genoese, a
Consul-General with a wife as beautiful