家庭的和睦__Honore De Balzac.pdf

英文名著3000 本 Domestic Peace by Honore de Balzac Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell 1 英文名著3000 本 Dedicated to my dear niece Valentine Surville. The incident recorded in this sketch took place towards the end of the month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleons fugitive empire attained the apogee of its splendor. The trumpet-blasts of Wagram were still sounding an echo in the heart of the Austrian monarchy. Peace was being signed between France and the Coalition. Kings and princes came to perform their orbits, like stars, round Napoleon, who gave himself the pleasure of dragging all Europe in his train--amagnificent experiment in the power he afterwards displayed at Dresden. Never, as contemporaries tell us, did Paris see entertainments mre superb than those whic h preceded and followed the sovereigns marriage with an Austrian archduchess. Never, in the most splendid days of the Monarchy, had so many crowned heads thronged the shores of the Seine, never had 2 英文名著3000 本 the French aristocracy been so rich or so splendid. The diamonds lavishly scattered over the womens dresses,and the gold and silver embroidery on the uniforms contrasted so strongly with the penury of the Republic, that the wealth of the globe seemed to be rolling through the drawing-rooms of Paris. Intoxication seemed to have turned the brains of this Empire of a day. All the military, not excepting their chief, reveled like parvenus in the treasure conquered for them by a million men with