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A Country Doctor
Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf Editions.
The Country Doctor.
Honoré de Balzac.
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Honore de Balzac . The Country Doctor.
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About the author
Le père Goriot
Eugènie Grandet
Les illusions perdues
Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 -
August 18, 1850), was a French novel-
ist.
Balzac’s realistic prose and his strength as an encyclopedic
recorder of his age outshine any small detracting qualities of
his style to make him a Dickensian bastion of French litera-
ture.
Balzac is buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris,
France. He is commemorated by a monumental statue which
Auguste Rodin was commissioned to sculpt.
He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France in the rue de
l’Armée Italienne.
He would become one of the creators of Realism in litera-
ture, though his work is still largely in the tradition of French
Literary Romanticism. His Human Comedy ( La Comé die
humaine ) spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an
attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in mod-
ern bourgeois France.
Balzac’s work habits are legendarily intimidating - he wrote
for up to 15 hours a day, fuelled by innumerable cups of black
coffee. Because of this extraordinarily large output, many of
the novels display minor imperfections and in some cases out-
right careless writing.
Several, however, are widely recognized to be masterpieces:
La peau de chagrin
Cousine Bette
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Honore de Balzac . The Country Doctor.
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Contents
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Honore de Balzac . The Country Doctor.
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1
The Country
Doctor.
Chapter 1.
The countryside and the man.
Translated By Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell
“For a wounded heart—shadow and silence.”
On a lovely spring morning in the year 1829, a man of fifty
or thereabouts was wending his way on horseback along the
mountain road that leads to a large village near the Grande
Chartreuse. This village is the market town of a populous can-
ton that lies within the limits of a valley of some considerable
length. The melting of the snows had filled the boulder-strewn
bed of the torrent (often dry) that flows through this valley,
which is closely shut in between two parallel mountain barri-
ers, above which the peaks of Savoy and of Dauphine tower on
every side.
All the scenery of the country that lies between the chain
of the two Mauriennes is very much alike; yet here in the dis-
To my Mother.
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Honore de Balzac . The Country Doctor.
Purchase the entire Coradella Collegiate Bookshelf on CD at
3
trict through which the stranger was traveling there are soft
undulations of the land, and varying effects of light which might
be sought for elsewhere in vain. Sometimes the valley, sud-
denly widening, spreads out a soft irregularly-shaped carpet of
grass before the eyes; a meadow constantly watered by the
mountain streams that keep it fresh and green at all seasons of
the year. Sometimes a roughly-built sawmill appears in a pic-
turesque position, with its stacks of long pine trunks with the
bark peeled off, and its mill stream, brought from the bed of
the torrent in great square wooden pipes, with masses of drip-
ping filament issuing from every crack. Little cottages, scat-
tered here and there, with their gardens full of blossoming fruit
trees, call up the ideas that are aroused by the sight of industri-
ous poverty; while the thought of ease, secured after long ye ars
of toil, is suggested by some larger houses farther on, with their
red roofs of flat round tiles, shaped like the scales of a fish.
There is no door, moreover, that does not duly exhibit a basket
in which the cheeses are hung up to dry. Every roadside and
every croft is adorned with vines; which here, as in Italy, they
train to grow about dwarf elm trees, whose leaves are stripped
off to feed the cattle.
Nature, in her caprice, has brought the sloping hills on ei-
ther side so near together in some places, that there is no room
for fields, or buildings, or peasants’ huts. Nothing lies between
them but the torrent, roaring over its waterfalls between two
lofty walls of granite that rise above it, their sides covered with
the leafage of tall beeches and dark fir trees to the height of a
hundred feet. The trees, with their different kinds of foliage,
rise up straight and tall, fantastically colored by patches of li-
chen, forming magnificent colonnades, with a line of strag-
gling hedgerow of guelder rose, briar rose, box and arbutus
above and below the roadway at their feet. The subtle perfume
of this undergrowth was mingled just then with scents from
the wild mountain region and with the aromatic fragrance of
young larch shoots, budding poplars, and resinous pines.
Here and there a wreath of mist about the heights some-
times hid and sometimes gave glimpses of the gray crags, that
seemed as dim and vague as the soft flecks of cloud dispersed
among them. The whole face of the country changed every
moment with the changing light in the sky; the hues of the
mountains, the soft shades of their lower slopes, the very shape
of the valleys seemed to vary continually. A ray of sunlight
through the tree-stems, a clear space made by nature in the
woods, or a landslip here and there, coming as a surprise to
make a contrast in the foreground, made up an endless series
of pictures delightful to see amid the silence, at the time of
year when all things grow young, and when the sun fills a cloud-
less heaven with a blaze of light. In short, it was a fair land—it
was the land of France!
The traveler was a tall man, dressed from head to foot in a
suit of blue cloth, which must have been brushed just as care-
fully every morning as the glossy coat of his horse. He held
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