Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Prince Of Bohemia
    A Prince Of Bohemia
    A Prince Of Bohemia
    Ebook60 pages55 minutes

    A Prince Of Bohemia

    By Honoré de Balzac

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Prince of Bohemia is novella by the celebrated French writer Honoré de Balzac first published in a literary magazine in 1840 to be later included in Balzac’s voluminous collection entitled The Human Comedy. The story tells about Madame Dinah de la Baudraye, a character who appears in other stories by Balzac. She is a self-important poetess of little merit who publishes her works pseudonymously. Madame de la Baudraye meets with other people interested in literature at the home of the Marquise de Rochefide. Based on accounts recounted by a friend named Raoul Nathan, she writes a novella and submits it for publication. This novella is itself entitled The Prince of Bohemia and centers on another recurrent character in Balzac’s works, the dancer Claudine Chaffaroux also known as Tullia. Besides, Balzac’s work theorizes about the nature of bohemianism and its features. As one of his characters explains: “The word Bohemia tells you everything. Bohemia has nothing and lives upon what it has. Hope is its religion; faith (in oneself) its creed; and charity is supposed to be its budget. All these young men are greater than their misfortune; they are under the feet of Fortune, yet more than equal to Fate.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781780006680
    A Prince Of Bohemia
    Author

    Honoré de Balzac

    Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

    Read more from Honoré De Balzac

    Related to A Prince Of Bohemia

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      My Golden Book Of Hours

      Jun 1, 2022

      My Golden Book Of Hours
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Matt Seidel

      Dec 9, 2017

      I tend to buy used books in bunches, which means the haul from some expeditions stays buried for weeks, months, years even. For this entry, I highlight three finds that, breaking custom, I bought and read almost immediately this year: Hugo Charteris’

      6 min read

    • Article

      Francis Spufford Vividly Recreates an 18th-Century New York in ‘Golden Hill’

      Jul 26, 2018

      Dear Reader, envision that Village which grew upon the southern strand of that isle of Manhattoes: a Lenape settlement purchased for 60 guilders and named for Amsterdam, later to be acquired by gunships of King James, and her wooden-legged governor r

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Foul-mouthed Miller And The Prim Prioress

      Jan 3, 2024

      HAT Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘drasty rhyming is nat worth a toord’ (his ‘dirty rhyming isn’t worth a turd’), the Host’s pungent dismissal in Chaucer’s best-known, but incomplete poem The Canterbury Tales, is a verdict that, with good reason, posterity has

      4 min read

    • Article

      Family Drama

      Feb 18, 2021

      Family Drama
      4 min read

    • Article

      Viveur Pitch

      Dec 1, 2023

      Viveur Pitch
      3 min read

    • Article

      Past In To Present

      Aug 3, 2023

      Past In To Present
      6 min read

    • Article

      Stranger Than Fiction

      Apr 12, 2024

      Stranger Than Fiction
      5 min read

    • Article

      Georges Clemenceau

      Aug 2, 2023

      Georges Clemenceau
      7 min read

    • Article

      Very Hampstead, very Kingsley Amis

      Oct 29, 2020

      I HEARD THESE WORDS in the Flask Bookshop in Flask Walk, Hampstead — which I owned and ran from 1975 until 1988 — while slumped in the back room on my leather swivel chair, quite as usual, smoking a pipe and reading: I was always reading. It was a un

      10 min read

    • Article

      You’re Descended from Royalty and So Is Everybody Else

      Jan 4, 2018

      Charlemagne, Carolingian King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor, the great European conciliator; your ancestor. I am making an assumption that you are broadly of European descent, which is not statistically unreasonable but certainly not definitive.

      11 min read

    • Article

      Last Portion Of Chips

      Sep 21, 2022

      Last Portion Of Chips
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Secret History of Creative Nonfiction

      Oct 15, 2021

      A common misconception about literary history is that women weren’t writing professionally or significantly before Jane Austen. To talk about women’s historical oppression, Virginia Woolf famously conjured up an imaginary sister for William Shakespea

      8 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Prince Of Bohemia

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Prince Of Bohemia - Honoré de Balzac

      A Prince of Bohemia

      By Honore de Balzac

      DEDICATION

      To Henri Heine.

      I inscribe this to you, my dear Heine, to you that represent in Paris the ideas and poetry of Germany, in Germany the lively and witty criticism of France; for you better than any other will know whatsoever this Study may contain of criticism and of jest, of love and truth.

      DE BALZAC.

      A PRINCE OF BOHEMIA

      My dear friend, said Mme. de la Baudraye, drawing a pile of manuscript from beneath her sofa cushion, will you pardon me in our present straits for making a short story of something which you told me a few weeks ago?

      Anything is fair in these times. Have you not seen writers serving up their own hearts to the public, or very often their mistress’ hearts when invention fails? We are coming to this, dear; we shall go in quest of adventures, not so much for the pleasure of them as for the sake of having the story to tell afterwards.

      After all, you and the Marquise de Rochefide have paid the rent, and I do not think, from the way things are going here, that I ever pay yours.

      Who knows? Perhaps the same good luck that befell Mme. de Rochefide may come to you.

      Do you call it good luck to go back to one’s husband?

      No; only great luck. Come, I am listening.

      And Mme. de la Baudraye read as follows:

      Scene—a splendid salon in the Rue de Chartres-du-Roule. One of the most famous writers of the day discovered sitting on a settee beside a very illustrious Marquise, with whom he is on such terms of intimacy, as a man has a right to claim when a woman singles him out and keeps him at her side as a complacent /souffre-douleur/ rather than a makeshift.

      Well, says she, have you found those letters of which you spoke yesterday? You said that you could not tell me all about /him/ without them?

      Yes, I have them.

      It is your turn to speak; I am listening like a child when his mother begins the tale of ‘Le Grand Serpentin Vert’.

      "I count the young man in question in that group of our acquaintances which we are wont to style our friends. He comes of a good family; he is a man of infinite parts and ill-luck, full of excellent dispositions and most charming conversation; young as he is, he is seen much, and while awaiting better things, he dwells in Bohemia.  Bohemianism, which by rights should be called the doctrine of the Boulevard des Italiens, finds its recruits among young men between twenty and thirty, all of them men of genius in their way, little known, it is true, as yet, but sure of recognition one day, and when that day comes, of great distinction. They are distinguished as it is at carnival time, when their exuberant wit, repressed for the rest of the year, finds a vent in more or less ingenious buffoonery.

      "What times we live in! What an irrational central power which allows such tremendous energies to run to waste! There are diplomatists in Bohemia quite capable of overturning Russia’s designs, if they but felt the power of France at their backs. There are writers, administrators, soldiers, and artists in Bohemia; every faculty, every kind of brain is represented there. Bohemia is a microcosm. If the Czar would buy Bohemia for a score of millions and set its population down in Odessa—always supposing that they consented to leave the asphalt of the boulevards—Odessa would be Paris with the year. In Bohemia, you find the flower doomed to wither and come to nothing; the flower of the wonderful young manhood of France, so sought after by Napoleon and Louis XIV., so neglected for the last thirty years by the modern Gerontocracy that is blighting everything else—that splendid young manhood of whom a witness so little prejudiced as Professor Tissot wrote, ‘On all sides the Emperor employed a younger generation in every way worthy of him; in his councils, in the general administration, in negotiations bristling with difficulties or full of danger, in the government of conquered countries; and in all places Youth responded to his demands upon it. Young men were for Napoleon the /missi hominici/ of Charlemagne.’

      "The word Bohemia tells you everything. Bohemia has nothing and lives upon what it has. Hope is its religion; faith (in oneself) its creed; and charity is supposed to be its budget. All these young men are greater than their misfortune; they are under the feet of Fortune, yet more than equal to Fate.

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1