UNCONSCIOUS-COMEDIANS(昏迷的喜剧家).pdfVIP

UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS BY HONORE DE BALZAC Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley DEDICATION To Monsieur le Comte Jules de Castellane. 1 UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS TEXT Leon de Lora, our celebrated landscape painter, belongs to one of the noblest families of the Roussillon (Spanish originally) which, although distinguished for the antiquity of its race, has been doomed for a century to the proverbial poverty of hidalgos. Coming, light-footed, to Paris from the department of the Eastern Pyrenees, with the sum of eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum, he had in some degree forgotten the miseries and privations of his childhood and his family amid the other privations and miseries which are never lacking to rapins, whose whole fortune consists of intrepid vocation. Later, the cares of fame and those of success were other causes of forgetfulness. If you have followed the capricious and meandering course of these studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinners pupil, one of the heroes of A Start in Life (Scenes from Private Life), and his brief apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter, emulator of the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more the shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the house of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute and an officer of the Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has an in