Unconscious Comedians

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About this book

Unconscious Comedians is by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley. The opening names Leon de Lora, “our celebrated landscape painter,” as belonging to one of the noblest families of the Roussillon, and says he came to Paris light-footed with eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum. Gazonal sprang from his lodgings to the street, from the street to a street-cab, and drove to the rue de Berlin to find his cousin. Leon de Lora sent word by a servant to his cousin Gazonal that he invited him to breakfast the next day at the Cafe de Paris.

Leon tells his cousin he intends to present him to-night in the salon of a duchess of the rue Saint-Georges, where he will see the aristocracy of the lorettes. Bixiou says that in the year 1800 a Toulousian named Cabot, a young wig-maker devoured by ambition, came to Paris and set up a shop. Gazonal makes one remark only on entering: “It is finer than the Tuileries!”

About the author

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist whose vast Human Comedy, a connected series of novels and stories, is a monument of literary realism and one of the great achievements of world literature.