文档介绍：THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES
THE GIRL WITH THE
GOLDEN EYES
by HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by Ellen Marriage
DEDICATION
To Eugene Delacroix, Painter.
1
THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES
PREPARER'S NOTE
The Girl with the Golden Eyes is the third part of a trilogy. Part one is
entitled Ferragus and part two is The Duchesse de Langeais. The three
stories are bined under the title The Thirteen.
2
THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES
One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is,
surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace--a people fearful to
behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil
from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human
beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born
again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out
at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains
are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of
strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike
worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity? What is
it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few observations upon the soul of Paris
may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two
ages--youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem
young. In looking at this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone
to reflection, experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital,
that vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot
even extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted.
A few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal hue
of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a hell.
Take the phrase for truth. There all is smoke and fire, everything gleams,
crackles, flames, evaporates, dies out, then lights up agai