文档介绍：HONORINE
HONORINE
by HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Clara Bell
DEDICATION
To Monsieur Achille Deveria
An affectionate remembrance from the Author.
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 fort 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
prehension, 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.
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HONORINE
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 ueil-- but a meal which rem