Balzac's lifelong and finally futile campaign to be elected
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womens jordan flight 45 white/ pink or black/pink the"immortals" of the Academie Frangaise seemed as much motivated by a passion for money as for prestige. After 1836 he declared that he would get in even if he had to batter down the Academie's doors with cannon fire. The prize was an annual salary of two thousand francs plus another six thousand for serving on the Dictionary Committee, and probably a life peerage.Would Balzac have written, and what might he have written, if he had not been driven to pay for his extravagances? When the prospects of sharing Eve Hanska's (or someone else's) fortune seemed to take
nike air max ltd white black off the financial pressure, or when illness or travelinterfered with his purchases, he did write less.
air max 2011 We must, then, be grateful for the prodigal tastes that moved him to create. And for the sanguine disposition that made him believe he could somehow keep ahead of his creditors. Despite Balzac's sour view of human nature and his surgical accounts of the mercenary strain in mankind, he had an optimism about his own talent and the immortality of his work. This Baudelaire (1821-1867) noted in Balzac and other writers of genius. "How- ever great may be the sorrows that overtake them, however discouraging the human spectacle, their healthy temperaments always in the end prevail, and perhaps something better, which is a deep natural wisdom."
In the arts and letters, Balzac's Paris was a stage for giants. He knew Delacroix (1798-1863), one of whose paintings (Girl with the Perroquet) probably inspired his novel La Fille aux yeux d'or. He was a close friend of Gautier (1811-1872), a friend and rival of Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and of Eugene Sue (1804-1857), a confidant of George Sand (1804-1876), a target of Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), and an acquaintance of Rossini (1792-1868). Despite his herculean work schedule he wallowed in Parisian salon life, staying active in the arena of literary abuse and sycophancy.
It was an age, too, of volatile and oscillating political fortunes-from the ancien regime of Louis XVI, through the Revolution of178g, the Terror of1793-94, the Directory (1795-99), the Consulate (1799-1804), the Napole-
onic Empire (1804-14), the Restoration Monarchy of Louis XVIII (1814-30), the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830-48), the Revolution ofi848 and
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