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    The Elixir Of Life
    The Elixir Of Life
    The Elixir Of Life
    Ebook41 pages39 minutes

    The Elixir Of Life

    By Honoré de Balzac

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    The Elixir of Life is a fantastic tale by the French novelist and writer Honoré de Balzac in which he gives his own version of the legend of Don Juan that many other writers and poets dealt with, including the English Lord Byron. Balzac’s appraisal of the legend is generally satirical as he presents a rather negative image of the protagonist. In fact, Balzac’s Don Juan is an arrogant and egoist character who indulges heedlessly in all sorts of sinful behavior. The opening scene depicts Don Juan and a princely friend who are celebrating in the company of seven young ladies. He speaks to his companions about his aged father and insinuates that he is impatiently waiting for his death to inherit his great wealth. The fantastic element is introduced in Balzac’s story when the readers are informed of the presence of a phial containing a liquid that could bring the dead back to life. Don Juan’s father asks his son to pour the liquid on him once he dies, yet the son decides not to resurrect his father and keeps the phial for himself. To his misfortune, when his own son starts covering him with the liquid, an accident happens and he is not completely resurrected.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherA Word To The Wise
    Release dateAug 20, 2013
    ISBN9781780006703
    Author

    Honoré de Balzac

    Honoré de Balzac (Tours, 1799-París, 1850), el novelista francés más relevante de la primera mitad del siglo XIX y uno de los grandes escritores de todos los tiempos, fue autor de una portentosa y vasta obra literaria, cuyo núcleo central, la Comedia humana, a la que pertenece Eugenia Grandet, no tiene parangón en ninguna otra época anterior o posterior.

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      Book preview

      The Elixir Of Life - Honoré de Balzac

      THE ELIXIR OF LIFE

      By HONORE DE BALZAC

      TO THE READER

      At the very outset of the writer’s literary career, a friend, long since dead, gave him the subject of this Study. Later on he found the same story in a collection published about the beginning of the present century. To the best of his belief, it is some stray fancy of the brain of Hoffmann of Berlin; probably it appeared in some German almanac, and was omitted in the published editions of his collected works. The Comedie Humaine is sufficiently rich in original creations for the author to own to this innocent piece of plagiarism; when, like the worthy La Fontaine, he has told unwittingly, and after his own fashion, a tale already related by another. This is not one of the hoaxes in vogue in the year 1830, when every author wrote his tale of horror for the amusement of young ladies. When you have read the account of Don Juan’s decorous parricide, try to picture to yourself the part which would be played under very similar circumstances by honest folk who, in this nineteenth century, will take a man’s money and undertake to pay him a life annuity on the faith of a chill, or let a house to an ancient lady for the term of her natural life! Would they be for resuscitating their clients? I should dearly like a connoisseur in consciences to consider how far there is a resemblance between a Don Juan and fathers who marry their children to great expectations. Does humanity, which, according to certain philosophers, is making progress, look on the art of waiting for dead men’s shoes as a step in the right direction? To this art we owe several honorable professions, which open up ways of living on death. There are people who rely entirely on an expected demise; who brood over it, crouching each morning upon a corpse, that serves again for their pillow at night. To this class belong bishops’ coadjutors, cardinals’ supernumeraries, tontiniers, and the like. Add to the list many delicately scrupulous persons eager to buy landed property beyond their means, who calculate with dry logic and in cold blood the probable duration of the life of a father or of a step-mother, some old man or woman of eighty or ninety, saying to themselves, I shall be sure to come in for it in three years’ time, and then---- A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life. Then what must it be to live when every moment of your life is tainted with murder? And have we not just admitted that a host of human creatures in our midst are led by our laws, customs, and usages to dwell without ceasing on a fellow-creature’s death? There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or

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