A Combien l’Amour revient ...

Features A Combien l’Amour revient ...

[Ebook Reader of How Much Love Returns to Old Men]How Much Love Returns to Old Men, by Honoré de Balzac.Extract :For the past eight days, Nucingen had been bargaining for the delivery of the woman he loved, almost every day, in the mezzanine of rue Neuve Saint Marc.
There reigned Asia among the most beautiful adornments arriving at this horrible phase where dresses are no longer dresses and are not yet rags.
The setting was in harmony with the figure that this woman composed, because these shops are one of the most sinister particularities of Paris.
We see cast-off clothes that Death has thrown there with his fleshless hand, and we then hear the death rattle of phthisis under a shawl, just as we can sense the agony of misery under a dress laminated with gold.
The atrocious debates between Luxury and Hunger are written there on light lace.
We find there the physiognomy of a Queen under a feathered turban whose pose recalls and almost reestablishes the absent figure.
It’s the hideous in the pretty!
Juvenals whip, waved by the official hands of the auctioneer, scatters the peeled muffs, the withered furs of the beleaguered Messalines.
It is a muck of flowers where, here and there, roses cut from yesterday, worn one day, shine, and on which an old woman is always crouching, the first cousin of usury, the bald, toothless Occasion, and ready to sell the contents, as she is so used to buying the container, the dress without the woman or the woman without the dress!..(Audio book)