文档介绍：DOMESTIC PEACE
DOMESTIC PEACE
BY HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
Dedicated to my dear niece Valentine Surville.
1
DOMESTIC PEACE
The incident recorded in this sketch took place towards the end of the
month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleon's fugitive empire
attained the apogee of its splendor. The trumpet-blasts of Wagram were
still sounding an echo in the heart of the Austrian monarchy. Peace was
being signed between France and the Coalition. Kings and princes came to
perform their orbits, like stars, round Napoleon, who gave himself the
pleasure of dragging all Europe in his train--a magnificent experiment in
the power he afterwards displayed at Dresden. Never, as contemporaries
tell us, did Paris see entertainments more superb than those which
preceded and followed the sovereign's marriage with an Austrian
archduchess. Never, in the most splendid days of the Monarchy, had so
many crowned heads thronged the shores of the Seine, never had the
French aristocracy been so rich or so splendid. The diamonds lavishly
scattered over the women's dresses, and the gold and silver embroidery on
the uniforms contrasted so strongly with the penury of the Republic, that
the wealth of the globe seemed to be rolling through the drawing-rooms of
Paris. Intoxication seemed to have turned the brains of this Empire of a
day. All the military, not excepting their chief, reveled like parvenus in the
treasure conquered for them by a million men with worsted epaulettes,
whose demands were satisfied by a few yards of red ribbon.
At this time most women affected that lightness of conduct and facility
of morals which distinguished the reign of Louis XV. Whether it were in
imitation of the tone of the fallen monarchy, or because certain members
of the Imperial family had set the example--as certain malcontents of the
Faubourg Saint-Germain chose to say--it is certain that men and women
alike flung themselves into a li