Honoré Balzac

me. Vau­quer (née de Con­flans), who, as a mat­ter of fact, had seen forty-eight sum­mers, though she would only own to thirty-nine of them

but this au­di­ence is so ac­cus­tomed to ter­ri­ble sen­sa­tions, that only some unimag­in­able and well-neigh im­pos­si­ble woe could pro­duce any last­

he was pelted with jokes and be­la­bored with hard words.

In 1819, how­ever, the time when this drama opens, there was an al­most pen­ni­less young girl among Mme. Vau­quer’s board­ers.

last­ing im­pres­sion there

orty thou­sand francs

“one of the old­est and most highly rec­om­mended board­ing­houses in the Latin Quar­ter.”

e Rue Nueve-Sainte-Geneviève is like a bronze frame for a pic­ture for which the mind can­not be too well pre­pared by the con­tem­pla­tion of sad hues and sober im­ages.

v­i­liza­tion, like the car of Jug­ger­naut, is scarcely stayed per­cep­ti­bly in its progress by a heart less easy to break than the oth­ers that lie in its course; this also is bro­ken, and Civ­i­liza­tion con­tin­ues on her course tri­umphant.