It Was Not, All The Same, For The Sake Of This Check-
Ered Story That I Mentioned The Palais De Justice And
The Rue Royale.
The most interesting fact, to my
mind, about the high-street of Tours was that as you
walked toward the bridge on the right-hand _trottoir_
you can look up at the house, on the other side of
the way, in which Honore de Balzac first saw the
light.
That violent and complicated genius was a
child of the good-humored and succulent Touraine.
There is something anomalous in the fact, though, if
one thinks about it a little, one may discover certain
correspondences between his character and that of his
native province. Strenuous, laborious, constantly in
felicitous in spite of his great successes, he suggests
at times a very different set of influences. But he had
his jovial, full-feeding side, - the side that comes out
in the "Contes Drolatiques," which are the romantic
and epicurean chronicle of the old manors and abbeys
of this region. And he was, moreover, the product
of a soil into which a great deal of history had been
trodden. Balzac was genuinely as well as affectedly
monarchical, and he was saturated with, a sense of the
past. Number 39 Rue Royale - of which the base
ment, like all the basements in the Rue Royale, is
occupied by a shop - is not shown to the public; and
I know not whether tradition designates the chamber
in which the author of "Le Lys dans la Vallee"
opened his eyes into a world in which he was to see
and to imagine such extraordinary things.
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Words from 1613 to 1886
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