Search -
Cousin Betty, Cousin Pons and Other Stories
Cousin Betty Cousin Pons and Other Stories Author:Honoré de Balzac General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1899 Original Publisher: Gebbie Pub. Co. Subjects: Fiction / General Fiction / Classics Fiction / Literary Literary Criticism / European / French Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text... more ». When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: THE POOR PARENTS (Les Parents Pauvres). COUSIN PONS. Toward three o'clock in the afternoon of one October day in the year 1844, a man of sixty or thereabout, whom anybody might have credited with more than his actual age, was walking along the Boulevard des Italiens with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There was a smug expression about the mouth -- he looked like a merchant who has just done a good stroke of business, or a bachelor emerging from a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paris this is the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a human countenance. As soon as the elderly person appeared in the distance, a smile broke out over the faces of the frequenters of the boulevard, who daily, from their chairs, watch the passers-by, and indulge in the agreeable pastime of analyzing them. That smile is peculiar to Parisians; it says so many things -- ironical, quizzical, pitying; but nothing save the rarest of human curiosities can summon that look of interest to the faces of Parisians, sated as they are with every possible sight. A saying recorded of Hyacinthe, an actor celebrated for his repartees, will explain the archaeological value of the old gentleman, and the smile repeated like an echo by all eyes. Somebody once asked Hyacinthe where the hats were made that set the house in a roar as soon as he appeared. " I don't have them made," he said ; " I keep them ! " So also among the million actors who m...« less