Novels Author:Honoré de Balzac Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n. A WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART. After a moment's silence, Raphael said with a careless gesture— " Perhaps it is an effect of the fumes of punch—I really can... more »not tell—this clearness of mind that enables me to comprise my whole life in a single picture, where figures and hues, lights, shades, and half-tones are faithfully rendered. I should not have been so surprised at this poetical play of imagination if it were not accompanied with a sort of scorn for my past joys and sorrows. Seen from afar, my life appears to contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten years' duration can be brought to memory today in some few phrases, in which pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes a philosophical reflection. Instead of feeling things, I weigh and consider them " " You are as tiresome as the explanation of an amendment," cried Emile. " Very likely," said Raphael submissively. " I spare you the first seventeen years of my life for fear of abusing a listener's patience. Till that time, like you and thousands of others, I had lived my life at school or the Lyceum, with its imaginary troubles and genuine happinesses, which are so pleasant to look back upon. Our jaded palates still crave that Lenten fare, so long as we have not tried it afresh. It was a pleasant life, with the tasks that we thought so contemptible, but which taught us application for all that." "Let the drama begin," said Emile, half-plaintively, half- comically. " When I left school," Raphael went on, with a gesture that claimed the right of speaking, " my father submitted meto a strict discipline ; he installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five in the morning and be in bed by nine at night. He meant me to take my law studies seriously. I attended the scho...« less