Honorine, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: Honorine

Author: Honore de Balzac

Release Date: December 10, 2006 [EBook #1683]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HONORINE ***

Produced by Dagny, and John Bickers

HONORINE

HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Clara Bell

DEDICATION

To Monsieur Achille Deveria

An affectionate remembrance from the Author.

HONORINE

If the French have as great an aversion for traveling as the English have a propensity for it, both English and French have perhaps sufficient reasons. Something better than England is everywhere to be found; whereas it is excessively difficult to find the charms of France outside France. Other countries can show admirable scenery, and they frequently offer greater comfort than that of France, which makes but slow progress in that particular. They sometimes display a bewildering magnificence, grandeur, and luxury; they lack neither grace nor noble manners; but the life of the brain, the talent for conversation, the "Attic salt" so familiar at Paris, the prompt apprehension of what one is thinking, but does not say, the spirit of the unspoken, which is half the French language, is nowhere else to be met with. Hence a Frenchman, whose raillery, as it is, finds so little comprehe

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