The Quest of the Absolute La Recherche De L'absolu (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Quest of the Absolute: La Recherche De L'absolu The volume of the old edition of the Comedie Humaine, which opened with La Recherche de l'Absolu, together with that generally entitled Les Marana, contains the cream and flower of Balzac as a story-teller; and the first excels the second in showing the fiery heat and glow of the author's imagination. Its principal constituent, the title story, is large enough for a novel by itself, and is so given here. The chief of the minor elements, Le Chef-d' uvre inconnu, has seemed to some the actual masterpiece of the author. Jesus-Christ en Flandre, like some others of Balzac's short stories, intimates an intention in him of emulating the contes fantastiques, half-humorous and half-romantic, half-Voltairian and half-mystical, which were so much in favour in 1830. It is, I think, quite the best of them, and it shows its author's great manner in more points than one. But just as at the end of L' Elixir de longue Fie we want the touch of Hoffmann rather than that of Balzac; so here we find something that is not quite perfect, that wants another hand. Even as it is, we would not change for anything else, but we have the sense that the same thing by another person might have been even better. Melmoth reconcilie, an inferior thing in itself, has in the same way a sort of special and adventitious interest. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."