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L'illustre Gaudissart
''L'illustre Gaudissart'' (English "The Illustrious Gaudissart") is a short story by Honoré de Balzac. It was published in 1833 and is one of the ''Scènes de la vie de province'' of ''La Comédie humaine''. Plot summary Felix Gaudissart is a successful and ambitious travelling salesman, based in Paris. He is nicknamed "The Illustrious Gaudissart". He has previously sold clothing and hats, but at the start of the story he has also taken up selling life insurance and subscriptions to newspapers. The latter include newspapers advocating Saint-Simonianism and republicanism, and he learns the Saint-Simonian doctrine without having any belief in it. He sets off to the Touraine area on a sales trip, and during this trip stays in the town of Vouvray. He tries to sell his items to a local man named Vernier, without realising that Vernier is strongly opposed to Saint-Simonianism. As a practical joke, Vernier recommends that he sells his items to his insane neighbour Margaritis. After a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Honoré De Balzac
Honoré de Balzac ( , more commonly ; ; born Honoré Balzac; 20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. The novel sequence ''La Comédie humaine'', which presents a panorama of post-Napoleonic French life, is generally viewed as his ''Masterpiece, magnum opus''. Owing to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of Literary realism, realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous writers, including the novelists Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert, and Henry James, and filmmakers François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlantic, North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and List of islands of France, many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean, giving it Exclusive economic zone of France, one of the largest discontiguous exclusive economic zones in the world. Metropolitan France shares borders with Belgium and Luxembourg to the north; Germany to the northeast; Switzerland to the east; Italy and Monaco to the southeast; Andorra and Spain to the south; and a maritime border with the United Kingdom to the northwest. Its metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea. Its Regions of France, eighteen integral regions—five of which are overseas—span a combined area of and hav ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Language
French ( or ) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-Romance, a descendant of the Latin spoken in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien language, Francien) largely supplanted. It was also substratum (linguistics), influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul and by the Germanic languages, Germanic Frankish language of the post-Roman Franks, Frankish invaders. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, it was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole, were established. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Fra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Comédie Humaine
(; English: ''The Human Comedy'') is Honoré de Balzac's 1829–48 multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration (1815–30) and the July Monarchy (1830–48). ''La Comédie humaine'' consists of 91 finished works (stories, novels, or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works (some of which exist only as titles). It does not include Balzac's five theatrical plays or his collection of humorous tales ''Les Cent Contes drolatiques'' (1832–37). A pioneer of the modern novel, Balzac describes the totality of reality as he understood it, and shows aspects of life hitherto ignored in literature, because they were ugly or vulgar. He shows in its various forms the rise of capitalism and the omnipotence of money, leading to the disappearance of nobility and the dissolution of social ties. La Comédie Humaine refers to the medieval poem Divine Comedy. Balzac's world is grounded in sociology, not theology, where l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1833 In Literature
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1833. Events *January ** ''The Knickerbocker'' is established by Charles Fenno Hoffman as ''The Knickerbacker: or, New-York monthly magazine''. **Alphonse de Lamartine is elected a ''député'' of France. *c. January – Richard Bentley (publisher) issues the first collected edition of Jane Austen's novels. *February 16 – Victor Hugo and Juliette Drouet begin a fifty-year affair. This is recorded in his novel ''Les Misérables'' (1862) as the date of Marius and Cosette's wedding night (Part V, Book 6, Chapter 1). *March 16 – ''Parley's Magazine'', an American periodical for young readers, publishes its first issue in Boston. *March 25 – Edmund Kean, playing Othello to the Iago of his son, Charles Kean, collapses on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London, and dies two months later. *June 10 – The Dramatic Authors Act passed in the United Kingdom grants playwrights copyright in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Language
English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples that Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, migrated to Britain after its End of Roman rule in Britain, Roman occupiers left. English is the list of languages by total number of speakers, most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influences of the former British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the United States. English is the list of languages by number of native speakers, third-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish language, Spanish; it is also the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second-language speakers than native speakers. English is either the official language or one of the official languages in list of countries and territories where English ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Story
A short story is a piece of prose fiction. It can typically be read in a single sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest types of literature and has existed in the form of legends, Myth, mythic tales, Folklore genre, folk tales, fairy tales, tall tales, fables, and anecdotes in various ancient communities around the world. The modern short story developed in the early 19th century. Definition The short story is a crafted form in its own right. Short stories make use of plot, resonance and other dynamic components as in a novel, but typically to a lesser degree. While the short story is largely distinct from the novel or novella, novella/short novel, authors generally draw from a common pool of literary techniques. The short story is sometimes referred to as a genre. Determining what exactly defines a short story remains problematic. A classic definition ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saint-Simonianism
Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (; ; 17 October 1760 – 19 May 1825), better known as Henri de Saint-Simon (), was a French political, economic and socialist theorist and businessman whose thought had a substantial influence on politics, economics, sociology and the philosophy of science. He was a younger relative of the famous memoirist the Duc de Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon created a political and economic ideology known as Saint-Simonianism () that claimed that the needs of an ''industrial class'', which he also referred to as the working class, needed to be recognized and fulfilled to have an effective society and an efficient economy.Keith Taylor (ed, tr.). ''Henri de Saint Simon, 1760–1825: Selected writings on science, industry and social organization''. New York, US: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc, 1975. pp. 158–161. Unlike conceptions within industrializing societies of a working class being manual laborers alone, Saint-Simon's late-18th-century conce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Touraine
Touraine (; ) is one of the traditional provinces of France. Its capital was Tours. During the political reorganization of French territory in 1790, Touraine was divided between the departments of Indre-et-Loire, :Loir-et-Cher, Indre and Vienne. Geography Traversed by the river Loire and its tributaries the Cher, the Indre and the Vienne, Touraine makes up a part of the western Paris Basin. It is well known for its viticulture. The TGV high-speed train system, which connects Tours with Paris (200 kilometers away) in just over an hour, has made Touraine a place of residence for people who work in the French capital but seek a different quality of life. History Touraine takes its name from a Celtic tribe called the Turones, who inhabited the region about two thousand years ago. In 1044, the control of Touraine was given to the Angevins, who (as the House of Plantagenet) became kings of England in 1154, the castle of Chinon being their greatest stronghold. In 1205, Phil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vouvray
Vouvray (, , ) is a commune in the Indre-et-Loire department in central France. It is around 9 km east of the centre of Tours. It is best known for its production of white wine, rated among the best in France. Population Education Schools include a public preschool; a public elementary school, Ecole élémentaire publique de Vouvray; a public junior high school, Collège public Gaston Huet; and a private elementary and junior high school, Ecole et Collège Sainte Thérèse à Vouvray. Collège privé Sainte-Thérèse " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Duel
A duel is an arranged engagement in combat between two people with matched weapons. During the 17th and 18th centuries (and earlier), duels were mostly single combats fought with swords (the rapier and later the small sword), but beginning in the late 18th century in England, duels were more commonly fought using pistols. Fencing and shooting continued to coexist throughout the 19th century. The duel was based on a code of honor. Duels were fought not to kill the opponent but to gain "satisfaction", that is, to restore one's honor by demonstrating a willingness to risk one's life for it. As such, the tradition of dueling was reserved for the male members of nobility; however, in the modern era, it extended to those of the upper classes. On occasion, duels with swords or pistols were fought between women. Legislation against dueling dates back to the medieval period. The Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) outlawed duels and civil legislation in the Holy Roman Empire agains ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1833 Short Stories
Events January–March * January 3 – The United Kingdom reasserts British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. * February 6 (January 25 on the Greek calendar) – Prince Otto Friedrich Ludwig of Bavaria arrives at the port of Nafplio to assume the title King Othon the First of Greece * February 16 – The United States Supreme Court hands down its landmark decision of Barron v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore. April–June * April 1 – General Antonio López de Santa Anna is elected President of Mexico by the legislatures of 16 of the 18 Mexican states. During his frequent absences from office to fight on the battlefield, Santa Anna turns the duties of government over to his vice president, Valentín Gómez Farías. * April 18 – Over 300 delegates from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland travel to the office of the Prime Minister, the Earl Grey, to call for the immediate abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. * May 6 * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
