The Vendetta E-Book

Honore de Balzac

• Herausgeber: Honore de Balzac
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

“The Vendetta” is a novel by the French writer Honoré de Balzac. It is the eighth of the Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes of Private Life) in La Comédie humaine. “The Vendetta” is a short work relating the tragic fate of Ginevra Piombo, the daughter of proud Corsican immigrants, who has the misfortune of falling in love with another Corsican Luigi Porta. When it becomes known that Luigi is the sole survivor of a massacre in which the rest of his family were the victims of a bloody vendetta with Ginevra's family, Ginevra's father Bartolomeo is determined to complete the act of vengeance by having him killed. But Ginevra refuses to yield to her father's demands and she and Luigi are married…

Leseprobe

The Vendetta

by

Honoré de Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

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PROLOGUE

THE STUDIO

LABEDOYERE’S FRIEND

LOVE

MARRIAGE

RETRIBUTION

CHAPTER I

PROLOGUE

In the year 1800, toward the close of October, a foreigner, accompanied by a woman and a little girl, was standing for a long time in front of the palace of the Tuileries, near the ruins of a house recently pulled down, at the point where in our day the wing begins which was intended to unite the chateau of Catherine de Medici with the Louvre of the Valois.

The man stood there with folded arms and a bowed head, which he sometimes raised to look alternately at the consular palace and at his wife, who was sitting near him on a stone. Though the woman seemed wholly occupied with the little girl of nine or ten years of age, whose long black hair she amused herself by handling, she lost not a single glance of those her companion cast on her. Some sentiment other than love united these two beings, and inspired with mutual anxiety their movements and their thoughts. Misery is, perhaps, the most powerful of all ties.