文档介绍：EDIANS
UNCONSCIOUS
COMEDIANS
BY HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Monsieur te Jules de Castellane.
1
EDIANS
TEXT
Leon de Lora, our celebrated landscape painter, belongs to one of the
noblest families of the Roussillon (Spanish originally) which, although
distinguished for the antiquity of its race, has been doomed for a century
to the proverbial poverty of hidalgos. Coming, light-footed, to Paris from
the department of the Eastern Pyrenees, with the sum of eleven francs in
his pocket for all viaticum, he had in some degree forgotten the miseries
and privations of his childhood and his family amid the other privations
and miseries which are never lacking to "rapins," whose whole fortune
consists of intrepid vocation. Later, the cares of fame and those of ess
were other causes of forgetfulness.
If you have followed the capricious and meandering course of these
studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinner's pupil, one of the
heroes of "A Start in Life" (Scenes from Private Life), and his brief
apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter, emulator of
the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more the shabby,
frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he owns a
charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de Brambourg,
where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the house of Schinner,
his early master. He is a member of the Institute and an officer of the
Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has an e of twenty
thousand francs from the Funds, his pictures sell for their weight in gold,
and (what seems to him more extraordinary than the invitations he
receives occasionally to court balls) his name and fame, mentioned so
often for the last sixteen years by the press of Europe, has at last
rated to the valley of the Eastern Pyrenees, where vegetate three
veritable Loras: his father, his eldest brother, and an old