The Comedie Humaine Volume 25 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 Excerpt: ... WHAT LOVE COSTS AN OLD MAN. For a whole week Nucingen went almost every day to the store in the Rue Neuve-Saint-Marc to bargain for the delivery of the woman he desired. Here, sometimes under the name of Saint-Esteve, sometimes under that of her tool, Madame Nourisson, Asia sat enthroned among beautiful clothes in that hideous condition when they have ceased to be dresses and are not yet tatters. The setting was in harmony with the appearance assumed by the woman, for these stores are among the most hideous characteristics of Paris. You find there the garments tossed aside by the skinny hand of death; we hear, as it were, the gasping of consumption under a shawl, or detect the agonies of beggary under a gown spangled with gold. The horrible struggle between Luxury and Hunger is written on many a filmy lace; you may picture the countenance of a queen under a plumed turban placed in an attitude that recalls and almost reproduces the absent features. It is the hideous amid prettiness Juvenal's lash, in the hands of the auctioneer, scatters the shabby muffs, the moth-eaten furs of courtesans at bay. There is a dunghill of flowers, among which here and there we find a bright rose plucked but yesterday and worn for a day; and on this an old hag is always to be seen crouching--first cousin to Usury, the skinflint bargainer, bald and toothless, and ever ready to sell the contents, so well is she used to sell the covering--the gown without the woman, or the woman without the gown Here Asia was in her element, like the warder among convicts, like a vulture red-beaked amid corpses; more terrible than the savage horrors that made the passer-by shudder in astonishment sometimes, at seeing one of their youngest and sweetest reminiscences hung up in a dirty store-windo...