Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
    At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
    At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
    Ebook75 pages1 hour

    At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

    By Honoré de Balzac

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Monsieur Guillaume is a draper in Paris. He owns his shop, „La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote” and took the business over from his master, also marrying the daughter. Guillaume is the very portrait of the successful bourgeois. He has three clerks apprenticed to him, the first of whom, Joseph, is an orphan he intends to marry to his elder daughter Virginie. However, Joseph is in love with the younger daughter Augustine but Augustine is in love with a successful artist Théodore. How will all this turn out? „At the Sign of the Cat and Racket” is a short novel by Honoré de Balzac. It was first published in 1830, but the story takes place about two decades earlier. It is one of the earliest pieces Balzac wrote for inclusion in his „Comédie Humaine”, the collection of 91 interconnected writings in which he documents the entire scope of French society in the early 19th century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKtoczyta.pl
    Release dateApr 26, 2019
    ISBN9788381765527
    At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
    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.

    Read more from Honoré De Balzac

    Related to At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

    Related ebooks

    Historical Romance For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Dec 1, 2019

      Table Talk
      12 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky

      May 12, 2020

      Two Poems by Joseph Brodsky
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ship Of Fools

      Sep 29, 2022

      AS A SIMPLE GLANCE at most of them will tell you, there’s not a whole bunch of fun in being an opera critic — so we tend to greet the faintest prospect of joy with breathless hope. Imagine, then, the bitter gall we had to drink when the summer’s inco

      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Sep 4, 2018

      In London. England. Who knows why?Perhaps this rumpled guyFrom central casting or a page of Dickens.He’s taking ordinary usTo haunts of the illustrious,Where even dull pulse quickens. A red felt hat’s dark fingered brim,Food-spotted vest are—him.A mo

      4 min read

    • Article

      The FOLLY & the Reason

      Dec 8, 2020

      The FOLLY & the Reason
      7 min read

    • Article

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • Article

      Arcadian Dreams

      Mar 2, 2022

      Arcadian Dreams
      3 min read

    • Article

      Arcadian Dreams

      Mar 2, 2022

      Arcadian Dreams
      3 min read

    • Article

      Town & Country Notebook

      Jun 14, 2023

      1) Snails and slugs belong to the same class of molluscs: which one? 2) What grand Elizabethan house in Lincolnshire hosts one of the world’s most prestigious horse trials? 3) Britain’s Viking Age is generally considered to begin with the 793AD raid

      4 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      knew his seams both false & true, his garters, nifty eyelets. A gainful trade,stockings being what they were: always ruined or runneled: even Queen E’s silk fixed, darned at the tooes. He owned a brickworks, too. Wrote novels. Pamphlets. One about re

      2 min read

    • Article

      Drinking In The Art

      Jul 1, 2020

      Drinking In The Art
      5 min read

    • Article

      London Life Need to Know

      Nov 1, 2023

      London Life Need to Know
      7 min read

    • Article

      Air Rights

      Nov 1, 2020

      The French Church—never much on looks, red brick leaningin the direction of Romanesque—settled into modest circumstanceshow many decades on West 16th?Nothing divine in the details,veneer peeling from doors nevermeant for here, never open. No light,ev

      4 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Sep 29, 2022

      ONE MIGHT IMAGINE THAT most people would be rather flattered to find themselves described as “the chosen ones”, but not so the “international aesthetes” who according to a French magazine are injecting new life into Venice. Like all cosmopolitan citi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Venetian Tryst

      Apr 11, 2023

      Venetian Tryst
      5 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Sep 1, 2023

      Amber accord of Shalimar arrived before her into a room set like a scene from Scheherezade: Oriental rugs, brass lamps mantled with jujube glass. She entered slightly out of breath, one end of a silk sari afloat behind her, embraced my sister, called

      2 min read

    • Article

      Rome After Dark

      Mar 2, 2020

      Rome After Dark
      7 min read

    • Article

      Open FOR Pleasure

      Jun 29, 2021

      Open FOR Pleasure
      5 min read

    • Article

      La Otra Historia

      Jun 30, 2022

      La Otra Historia
      14 min read

    • Article

      My Interiors Life: Weaned On The Small Screen

      Nov 25, 2021

      FOR ME, IT WAS ALL DOWN TO what I saw on the box (which was a lot) — and this extended too to the arenas of action: a fantastic littering of such beautiful and extraordinary interiors, not one of which had I ever set foot in, nor even so much as glim

      9 min read

    • Article

      Woman About Town

      Apr 27, 2023

      THE SHOW BY MEXICAN ARTIST Bosco Sodi at the Palazzo Vendramin Grimani divided opinion in Venice last year. What Goes Around Comes Around was described as a reconfiguring of the journey of raw materials which had conventionally flowed just one way in

      3 min read

    • Article

      Behind The Scenes At The Museums

      Sep 1, 2021

      WHEN I learned our local museum had landed an £11 million lottery grant, my thoughts returned to a Sussex garden, where we first encountered the extraordinary John Letts. Our friend called him a campaigning polymath. He set up societies the way a Fre

      2 min read

    • Article

      Berlin

      Feb 1, 2024

      Berlin
      9 min read

    • Article

      Francis Spufford Vividly Recreates an 18th-Century New York in ‘Golden Hill’

      Jul 26, 2018

      Dear Reader, envision that Village which grew upon the southern strand of that isle of Manhattoes: a Lenape settlement purchased for 60 guilders and named for Amsterdam, later to be acquired by gunships of King James, and her wooden-legged governor r

      7 min read

    • Article

      Valparaíso

      Oct 6, 2022

      Valparaíso
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      At the Sign of the Cat and Racket - Honoré de Balzac

      Honoré de Balzac

      At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

      Warsaw 2019

      Contents

      Half-way down the Rue Saint-Denis, almost at the corner of the Rue du Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful houses which enable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy. The threatening walls of this tumbledown abode seemed to have been decorated with hieroglyphics. For what other name could the passer-by give to the Xs and Vs which the horizontal or diagonal timbers traced on the front, outlined by little parallel cracks in the plaster? It was evident that every beam quivered in its mortices at the passing of the lightest vehicle. This venerable structure was crowned by a triangular roof of which no example will, ere long, be seen in Paris. This covering, warped by the extremes of the Paris climate, projected three feet over the roadway, as much to protect the threshold from the rainfall as to shelter the wall of a loft and its sill-less dormer-window. This upper story was built of planks, overlapping each other like slates, in order, no doubt, not to overweight the frail house.

      One rainy morning in the month of March, a young man, carefully wrapped in his cloak, stood under the awning of a shop opposite this old house, which he was studying with the enthusiasm of an antiquary. In point of fact, this relic of the civic life of the sixteenth century offered more than one problem to the consideration of an observer. Each story presented some singularity; on the first floor four tall, narrow windows, close together, were filled as to the lower panes with boards, so as to produce the doubtful light by which a clever salesman can ascribe to his goods the color his customers inquire for. The young man seemed very scornful of this part of the house; his eyes had not yet rested on it. The windows of the second floor, where the Venetian blinds were drawn up, revealing little dingy muslin curtains behind the large Bohemian glass panes, did not interest him either. His attention was attracted to the third floor, to the modest sash-frames of wood, so clumsily wrought that they might have found a place in the Museum of Arts and Crafts to illustrate the early efforts of French carpentry. These windows were glazed with small squares of glass so green that, but for his good eyes, the young man could not have seen the blue-checked cotton curtains which screened the mysteries of the room from profane eyes. Now and then the watcher, weary of his fruitless contemplation, or of the silence in which the house was buried, like the whole neighborhood, dropped his eyes towards the lower regions. An involuntary smile parted his lips each time he looked at the shop, where, in fact, there were some laughable details.

      A formidable wooden beam, resting on four pillars, which appeared to have bent under the weight of the decrepit house, had been encrusted with as many coats of different paint as there are of rouge on an old duchess’ cheek. In the middle of this broad and fantastically carved joist there was an old painting representing a cat playing rackets. This picture was what moved the young man to mirth. But it must be said that the wittiest of modern painters could not invent so comical a caricature. The animal held in one of its forepaws a racket as big as itself, and stood on its hind legs to aim at hitting an enormous ball, returned by a man in a fine embroidered coat. Drawing, color, and accessories, all were treated in such a way as to suggest that the artist had meant to make game of the shop-owner and of the passing observer. Time, while impairing this artless painting, had made it yet more grotesque by introducing some uncertain features which must have puzzled the conscientious idler. For instance, the cat’s tail had been eaten into in such a way that it might now have been taken for the figure of a spectator–so long, and thick, and furry were the tails of our forefathers’ cats. To the right of the picture, on an azure field which ill-disguised the decay of the wood, might be read the name Guillaume, and to the left, Successor to Master Chevrel. Sun and rain had worn away most of the gilding parsimoniously applied to the letters of this superscription, in which the Us and Vs had changed places in obedience to the laws of old-world orthography.

      To quench the pride of those who believe that the world is growing cleverer day by day, and that modern humbug surpasses everything, it may be observed that these signs, of which the origin seems so whimsical to many Paris merchants, are the dead pictures of once living pictures by which our roguish ancestors contrived to tempt customers into their houses. Thus the Spinning Sow, the Green Monkey, and others, were animals in cages whose skills astonished the passer-by, and whose accomplishments prove the patience of the fifteenth-century artisan. Such curiosities did more to enrich their fortunate owners than the signs of Providence, Good-faith, Grace of God, and Decapitation of John the Baptist, which may still be seen in the Rue Saint-Denis.

      However, our stranger was certainly not standing there to admire the cat, which a minute’s attention sufficed to stamp on his memory. The young man himself had his peculiarities. His cloak, folded after the manner of an antique drapery, showed a smart pair of shoes, all the more remarkable in the midst of the Paris mud, because he wore white silk stockings, on which the splashes betrayed his impatience. He had just come, no doubt, from a wedding or a ball; for at this early hour he had in his hand a pair of white gloves, and his black hair, now out of curl, and flowing over his shoulders, showed that it had been dressed a la Caracalla, a fashion introduced as much by David’s school of painting as by the mania for Greek and Roman styles which characterized the early years of this century.

      In spite of the noise made by a few market gardeners, who, being late, rattled past towards the great market-place at a gallop, the busy street lay in

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1