✨ New Arrivals Just Dropped!Explore
HomeStore

Balzac's Paris

Product image 1
Product image 2

Balzac's Paris

In Balzac’s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the first capital of the modern world.

To this ageless city he makes a declaration of love in an accumulation of finely observed detail – the cafés, landmarks, avenues, parks – and captures the populace in countless meticulously drawn portraits: its lawyers, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators.

Balzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. ‘To saunter is a science,’ he writes, ‘it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.’ Eric Hazan follows in Balzac’s footsteps, criss-crossing the city in the novelist’s outsize boots, running between printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistresses and friends, stopping for a moment, struck by a detail that would be fixed in Balzac’s photographic memory.

More than a tour of the city, Balzac’s Paris is an attempt to measure the soul of a city as recovered in its finest literature.
Select Title
From $9.99
Balzac's Paris
$9.99

Product Information

Shipping & Returns

Description

In Balzac’s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the first capital of the modern world.

To this ageless city he makes a declaration of love in an accumulation of finely observed detail – the cafés, landmarks, avenues, parks – and captures the populace in countless meticulously drawn portraits: its lawyers, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators.

Balzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. ‘To saunter is a science,’ he writes, ‘it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.’ Eric Hazan follows in Balzac’s footsteps, criss-crossing the city in the novelist’s outsize boots, running between printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistresses and friends, stopping for a moment, struck by a detail that would be fixed in Balzac’s photographic memory.

More than a tour of the city, Balzac’s Paris is an attempt to measure the soul of a city as recovered in its finest literature.

You may also like

-70%
Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

A Civilian Occupation

$20.00

$6.00

Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain

$9.99

Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

All Over the Map

$9.99

-70%
Thumbnail 1

A History of the Barricade

$9.99

$3.00

-70%
Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

A New Kind of Bleak

$9.99

$3.00

-70%
Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

architect, verb.

$26.95

$8.08

-70%
Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

A Plague on Your Houses

$24.95

$7.48

-70%
Thumbnail 1

A People's History of London

$14.99

$4.50

-70%
Thumbnail 1

Anything But Mexican

$14.99

$4.50

Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

Atlas of Emotion

$45.00

Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

Basrayatha

$9.99

-70%
Thumbnail 1Thumbnail 2

A Walk Through Paris

$9.99

$3.00