“I can understand that from passion, or the pleasure to be found in placing our power in a pair of white hands, a man should obey his wife—but when it comes to obeying Médor—then away with Angelica!—The great secret of social alchemy, my dear sir, is to get the best of everything out of each stage of our life, to gather all its leaves in spring, all its flowers in summer, all its fruits in autumn. Now we—I and some boon companions—have enjoyed ourselves for twelve years, like musketeers, black, white, and red, refusing ourselves nothing, not even a filibustering expedition now and again; henceforth we mean to shake down ripe plums, at an age when experience has ripened the harvest. Come, join us; you shall have a share of the pudding we mean to stir.
At the moment when Paul de Manerville finished reading this letter, of which every sentence fell like a sledgehammer on the tower of his hopes, his illusions, and his love, he was already beyond the Azores. In the midst of this ruin, rage surged up in him, cold and impotent rage.
“What had I done to them?” he asked himself.
This question is the impulse of the simpleton, of the weak natures, which, as they can see nothing, can foresee nothing.
“Henri, Henri!” he cried aloud. “The one true friend!”
Many men would have gone mad. Paul went to bed and slept the deep sleep which supervenes on immeasurable disaster; as Napoleon slept after the battle of Waterloo.
Colophon
A Marriage Settlement
was published in 1835 by
Honoré de Balzac.
It was translated from French in 1901 by
Clara Bell.
This ebook was transcribed and produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Vince Rice,
and is based on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Gossip,
a painting completed in 1873 by
Giovanni Boldini.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
December 23, 2024, 9:41 p.m.
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Uncopyright
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