A Drama On The Seashore

La Comédie Humaine #80

by Honoré de Balzac

"A Drama on the Seashore" by Honoré de Balzac (translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, France, French Literature, Literature, Tragedy, Short Stories

48 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1834

About the author

French writer Honoré de Balzac (born Honoré Balzac), a founder of the realist school of fiction, portrayed the panorama of society in a body of works, known collectively as La comédie humaine .

Honoré de Balzac authored 19th-century novels and plays. After the fall of Napoléon in 1815, his magnum opus, a sequence of almost a hundred novels and plays, entitled, presents life in the years.

Due to keen observation of fine detail and unfiltered representation, European literature regards Balzac. He features renowned multifaceted, even complex, morally ambiguous, full lesser characters. Character well imbues inanimate objects; the city of Paris, a backdrop, takes on many qualities. He influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles John Huffam Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James, and Jack Kerouac as well as important philosophers, such as Friedrich Engels. Many works of Balzac, made into films, continue to inspire.

An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac adapted with trouble to the teaching style of his grammar. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. Balzac finished, and people then apprenticed him as a legal clerk, but after wearying of banal routine, he turned his back on law. He attempted a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician before and during his career. He failed in these efforts From his own experience, he reflects life difficulties and includes scenes.

Possibly due to his intense schedule and from health problems, Balzac suffered throughout his life. Financial and personal drama often strained his relationship with his family, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, he married Ewelina Hańska, his longtime paramour; five months later, he passed away.

Reviews

[Sara Jesus · Rating 3 out of 5]

O início é bastante belo, aborda a existência de duas juventudes. A juventude durante a qual se acredita e a juventude durante a qual se age.

O resto livro são os dramas dos pescadores. Foi uma leitura interessante.

Mas preferia que tivesse mantindo o tom filosófico do início

[Sladjana Kovacevic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un drame au bord de la mer- Honoré de Balzac
✒️"La Bretagne. Ce pays n’est beau que pour les grandes âmes ; les gens sans cœur n’y vivraient pas ; il ne peut être habité que par des poètes ou par des bernicles. N’a-t-il pas fallu que l’entrepôt du sel se plaçât sur ce rocher pour qu’il fût habité. D’un côté, la mer ; ici, des sables ; en haut, l’espace."
🌊Mala i nepoznata dela su pravi dragulji razbacani u velikom okeanu kakva je Balzakova Ljudska komedija.
🌊Jedna kratka priča iz filozofskog ciklusa počinje tako što jedan od likova koji se pojavljuju i u drugim delima,Louis Lambert,odlazi sa suprugom na odmor u Bretanju.
🌊Isprva vidimo mladi par koji se divi prirodi,uživa u prelepom danu i pejzažu.
🌊Zatim sreću ribara koji prodaje svoj ulov,i tu već u razgovoru s njim upoznaju težak život lokalnog stanovništva.
🌊Šetajući dalje ugledaju čoveka na steni. Pitaju ribara ko je taj usamljenik i zašto ne progovara. Sledi jedna zaista tragična priča o gresima za koje verovatno nema iskupljenja.

#7sensesofabook #bookstagram #readingaddict #knjige #literature #balzac

[Darren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tale of a mysterious recluse with a shocking back-story.

[Lucy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit overwrought, like the whole story of the putative narrator Louis Lambert. I think I prefer my Balzac to be a bit more analytical and ironic.

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Balzac's "Drama at the Seashore" besides being another memorable tragic short story, it clears up a mystery for me regarding, the Old Time Radio show, The Weird Circle episode, "The Strange Judgement" originally broadcasted on March 3, 1944. As soon as I saw a man in a grotto, knowing that several Balzac's stories are portrayed, I was very happy to finally find all those stories to be able to pair up with the radio episodes. I have not read "Louis Lambert" yet, so I am not aware of him or Pauline's story. Louis writes to his uncle about two men who live in Croisic, with very sad stories, one far worse than the other. One where the son does all for his father and the other where the son does all to destroy his father and mother. The Weird Circle did a wonder job with the man in the grotto but leaves off the extra and just as important part of this short story. Balzac is indeed a masterful and one of my favorite writers.

I did not read this edition but from a Delphi collection of his works which included the below.

"UN DRAME AU bord de la mer is an 1834 short story, narrated by the previous character Louis Lambert, who tells of a time when he was standing on a cliff at Croisic-point, daydreaming about his future and watching his wife Pauline swimming."


The Weird Circle
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYEsAn2...

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178268
The tale then concerns their encounter with a local fisherman and they learn about his unfortunate past.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178273
Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in measuring the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the angle at which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of the inner life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which for all men lies between twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of great thoughts, of fresh conceptions, because it is the age of immense desires. After that age,
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178276
short as the seed-time, comes that of execution.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178299
At the moment when the village roofs began to show like a faint gray line on the horizon, we met a fisherman, a poor man returning to Croisic. His feet were bare; his linen trousers ragged round the bottom; his shirt of common sailcloth, and his jacket tatters. This abject poverty pained us; it was like a discord amid our harmonies.

❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌spoiler alert❌❌❌❌❌❌❌


Louis and Pauline are extremely happy on vacation and in mental sync with each other, that after seeing a fisherman that is extremely poor and lives a lonely life without a wife because he must take care of his blind father. They look to go for a sight seeing hike down the seashore with this 36 year old man as a guide. They come to the grotto which the man refuses to pass, where an old man lives and doesn't talk to anyone. He receives meals from his niece. The story of Pierre Cambremer and his wife who had an only son, Jacques who they loved greatly and spoiled him in all ways, they excused his mean acts as a boy and finally it is known that he will steal and harm his parents. After finding proof of his son's theft and his continual acts towards them, he confronts his son with the help a priest, trying to get him to confess but Jacques sees his father will murder him when he finally does. The father seeing him obstinate to confess his crimes, he ties and bounds his son while he is sleeping. The mother begs her husband to have pity but the father is too angry and she refuses to help carry their son to the boat. After Pierre drops his son in the sea, murdering him, his wife dies of grief one week later. After confessing his crime, Pierre punishes himself to the grotto where he can never escape his grief. The parents could have possibly prevented Jacques' bad ways by punishing him and guiding his son to be a better person, and not giving him everything he wanted. The father should have sent him away or anything but what he did was too much. The parental mistakes are indeed felt.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178331
“Do you earn enough to live on?” I asked the man, in order to discover the cause of his evident penury. “With great hardships, and always poorly,” he replied. “Fishing on the coast, when one hasn’t a boat or deep-sea nets, nothing but pole and line, is a very uncertain business. You see we have to wait for
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178334
the fish, or the shell-fish; whereas a real fisherman puts out to sea for them. It is so hard to earn a living this way that I’m the only man in these parts who fishes along-shore. I spend whole days without getting anything. To catch a crab, it must go to sleep, as this one did, and a lobster must be silly enough to stay among the rocks. Sometimes after a high tide the mussels come in and I grab them.” “Well, taking one day with another, how much do you earn?”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178337
“Oh, eleven or twelve sous. I could do with that if I were alone; but I have got my old father to keep, and he can’t do anything, the good man, because he’s blind.” At these words, said simply, Pauline and I looked at each other without a word; then I asked, — “Haven’t you a wife, or some good friend?” He cast upon us one of the most lamentable glances that I ever saw as he answered, —
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178341
“If I had a wife I must abandon my father; I could not feed him and a wife and children too.” “Well, my poor lad, why don’t you try to earn more at the salt marshes, or by carrying the salt to the harbor?” “Ah, monsieur, I couldn’t do that work three months. I am not strong enough, and if I died my father would have to beg. I am forced to take a business which only needs a little knack and a great deal of patience.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178345
“But how can two persons live on twelve sous a day?” “Oh, monsieur, we eat cakes made of buckwheat, and barnacles which I get off the rocks.” “How old are you?” “Thirty-seven.” “Did you ever leave Croisic?” “I went once to Guerande to draw for the conscription; and I went to Savenay to the messieurs who measure for the army. If I had been half an inch taller they’d have made me a soldier. I should have died of
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178349
my first march, and my poor father would to-day be begging his bread.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178352
The strength of that feebleness amazed us; the man’s unconscious generosity belittled us. I saw that poor

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178353
being of instinct chained to that rock like a galley-slave to his ball; watching through twenty years for shell-fish to earn a living, and sustained in his patience by a single sentiment. How many hours wasted on a lonely shore! How many hopes defeated by a change of weather! He was hanging there to a granite rock, his arm extended like that of an Indian fakir, while his father, sitting in their hovel, awaited, in silence and darkness, a meal of the coarsest bread and shell-fish, if the sea permitted.
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178386
“How beautiful this silence!” she said to me; “and how the depth of it is deepened by the rhythmic quiver of the wave upon the shore.” “If you will give your understanding to the three immensities which surround us, the water, the air, and
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178388
the sands, and listen exclusively to the repeating sounds of flux and reflux,” I answered her, “you will not be able to endure their speech; you will think it is uttering a thought which will annihilate you. Last evening, at sunset, I had that sensation; and it exhausted me.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178399
We now heard the hurried steps of our guide; he had put on his Sunday clothes. We addressed a few ordinary words to him; he seemed to think that our mood had changed, and with that reserve that comes of misery, he kept silence. Though from time to time we pressed each other’s hands that we might feel
Highlight (Yellow) | Location 178401
the mutual flow of our ideas and impressions, we walked along for half an hour in silence, either because we were oppressed by the heat which rose in waves from the burning sands, or because the difficulty of walking absorbed our attention. Like children, we held each other’s hands; in fact, we could hardly have made a dozen steps had we walked arm in arm. The path which led to Batz was not so much as traced. A gust of wind was enough to efface all tracks left by the hoofs of horses or the wheels of carts; but the practised eye of our guide could recognize by scraps of mud or the dung of cattle the road that crossed that desert, now descending towards the sea, then rising landward according to either the fall of the ground or the necessity of rounding some breastwork of rock. By mid-day, we were only half way. “We will stop to rest over there,” I said, pointing to a promontory of rocks sufficiently high to make it probable we should find a grotto.

[Gláucia Renata · Rating 1 out of 5]

Publicado em 1834 faz parte dos Estudos Filosóficos.
Um casal, passeando pelo litoral encontra um pescador que lhes contará a história dramática ocorrida naquela local muitos anos atrás. Um filho criado com todo o mimo possível é estragado pelos pais e futuramente trará problemas a todos por seu mau comportamento. A forma que o pai encontra para sanar o problema é rápido e eficaz mas não é um método que eu aconselharia a pai algum. Ele simplesmente afoga o filho no mar. WTF Balzac?



Histórico de leitura
12/04/2019

"Os jovens tem quase todos um compasso com o qual se comprazem em medir o futuro: quando sua vontade combina com o ângulo atrevido que abrem, o mundo lhes pertence."

[Pianobikes · Rating 3 out of 5]

“¿Por qué aquel hombre en el granito? ¿Por qué aquel granito en aquel hombre? ¿Dónde estaba el hombre, dónde estaba el granito? Todo un mundo de pensamientos nos cayó a la cabeza” ~ Drama a la orilla del mar de Honoré de Balzac.

Relato leído en el #clasicosflash que narra el paseo de una pareja por la orilla del mar, guiada por un pescador de la localidad. En un punto del camino, el pescador decide hacer un rodeo para no toparse con un hombre que permanece aislado desde un fatídico día. Y ahí es cuando narra la historia de ese hombre a quien todos en el pueblo rehúyen.

¿Qué le habrá pasado? Si queréis saberlo tendréis que leer este cuento de Honore Balzac, narrado en primera persona y con un toque que me ha resultado un pelín prepotente.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

BEWARE: SPOILERS
This is not a review, it's a summary so that I can keep track of all the characters in La Comedie Humaine.

This one is a very short story, narrated by Louis Lambert who is joyfully spending time at the Croisic seashore with his wife Pauline. They meet a poverty-stricken fisherman and buy his catch, and they hire him to guide them to Batz. En route they come to a rocky place avoided by the locals, and the fisherman tells them the gruesome story of The Man With a Vow.
It is another tale of a parents who over-indulge their precious child: he grows up wild, dishonest and cruel. The parents belatedly try to reform him, and it comes to a head when he steals from them. The father gets the priest to hear his son's confession at gunpoint, and tells his son that next time he sins, he will die without confession.
He makes good his promise when his son sins again, and throws the boy from his boat. The mother dies of grief, and the man lives alone on the rock on bread and water brought to him by his niece.
This gloomy tale depresses both Louis and Pauline. They skip the trip to Batz, and when Louis can't shake his mood, Pauline tells him to write down the story as a way of dealing with it. BUt poor Louis can't get over the misery of it...

[Mariana Flores · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este livro de Honoré de Balzac, escrito em 1834, lê-se como quem lembra um sonho, ou como quem olha a paisagem pela janela embaciada num dia de chuva.Integrada originalmente na colecção de Balzac A Comédia Humana, esta é a história de um louco eremita com um passado misterioso, e de como o seu passado vem a ser conhecido por um casal de namorados de férias numa ilha. O ambiente é romântico no sentido histórico da palavra, melancólico e idílico.A pequena edição da Expo 98 é o livro de bolso perfeito para acompanhar uma viagem. Desconhecia a colecção e fiquei feliz por descobrir esta compilação de contos sobre o mar.

[Tim Potier · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the shorter episodes in Balzac's Human Comedy. Truthfully, his longer works (in the Comedy) are generally the best. Nevertheless, this sad story of a couple's devotion to their son ruined by dissipation works well. The tragic story is narrated ably by the fisherman who accompanies Louis and Pauline on their mini-adventure.

[marsi · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Nothing is so cruelly painful as to have powerless desires,”

“Ideas drop into our hearts or into our heads without consulting us. ”

“The loveliest scenery is that we make ourselves. What man with any poesy in him does not remember some mere mass of rock, which holds, it may be, a greater place in his memory than the celebrated landscapes of other lands, sought at great cost.”

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful!!!

[Miles Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brutal tale of moral philosophy.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, simple, the writing is great.

[Armin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seitenstück zu Louis Lambert. Großartige atmosphärische Erzählung, ganz hervorragend ausbalanciert. Klarer Fortschritt gegenüber den zuletzt gelesenen Erzählungen und Romanen von Balzac.

[myriam kisfaludi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Courte et triste histoire sur fonds de marais salants en Bretagne

[Natalie Shtivelman]

Hebrew translation. 3.5.

[Prasidh Ramson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fast becoming one of my favourite authors, this short story forms part of Balzac's La Comedié Humane series.

The author and his wife, Pauline, visit a seaside town in Brittany for a holiday. While visiting a deserted part of the town, they come across a fisherman and a hermit - the latter performing some form of penitence. The fisherman then relates the story of how the hermit came to settle in their town and the sad tale behind his anguish.

Apart from the detailed description of both the idyll and poverty in the seaside town, Balzac also weaves an engaging backstory to the hermit. His writing is simple, free flowing and accessible. Recognized as one of the proponents of European realism, his description of life, trials and tribulations in post-Napoleonic France should be recommended reading for everyone.

[A. C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lush, moving story

Told by a poetic young man in Breton (Brittany), this is a beautifully written legend of a hermit who cast himelf into exile due to a horrific but understandable crime.

[Yves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lors d'une visite au bord de la mer. Un couple se fait raconter une histoire tragique à propos d'une famille de la région.

L'histoire est très courte mais quand même intéressante.