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Page 3
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
you can think of. Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz
and Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By
Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Monsieur le Comte Jules de Castellane.
UNCONSCIOUS COMEDIANS
Leon de Lora, our celebrated landscape painter, belongs to one of the
noblest families of the Roussillon (Spanish originally) which,
although distinguished for the antiquity of its race, has been doomed
for a century to the proverbial poverty of hidalgos. Coming,
light-footed, to Paris from the department of the Eastern Pyrenees,
with the sum of eleven francs in his pocket for all viaticum, he had
in some degree forgotten the miseries and privations of his childhood
and his family amid the other privations and miseries which are never
lacking to "rapins," whose whole fortune consists of intrepid
vocation. Later, the cares of fame and those of success were other
causes of forgetfulness.
If you have followed the capricious and meandering course of these
studies, perhaps you will remember Mistigris, Schinner's pupil, one of
the heroes of "A Start in Life" (Scenes from Private Life), and his
brief apparitions in other Scenes. In 1845, this landscape painter,
emulator of the Hobbemas, Ruysdaels, and Lorraines, resembles no more
the shabby, frisky rapin whom we then knew. Now an illustrious man, he
owns a charming house in the rue de Berlin, not far from the hotel de
Brambourg, where his friend Brideau lives, and quite close to the
house of Schinner, his early master. He is a member of the Institute
and an officer of the Legion of honor; he is thirty-six years old, has
an income of twenty thousand francs from the Funds, his pictures sell
for their weight in gold, and (what seems to him more extraordinary
than the invitations he receives occasionally to court balls) his name
and fame, mentioned so often for the last sixteen years by the press
of Europe, has at last penetrated to the valley of the Eastern
Pyrenees, where vegetate three veritable Loras: his father, his eldest
brother, and an old paternal aunt, Mademoiselle Urraca y Lora.
In the maternal line the painter has no relation left except a cousin,
the nephew of his mother, residing in a small manufacturing town in
the department. This cousin was the first to bethink himself of Leon.
But it was not until 1840 that Leon de Lora received a letter from
Monsieur Sylvestre Palafox-Castal-Gazonal (called simply Gazonal) to
which he replied that he was assuredly himself,--that is to say, the
son of the late Leonie Gazonal, wife of Comte Fernand Didas y Lora.
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