Explore "A Study of Woman" by Honoré de Balzac on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Dedicated to the Marquis Jean-Charles di Negro.
The Marquise de Listomère is a young woman brought up in the spirit of the Restoration. She has principles, she fasts in season, she takes the Sacrament, she goes very much dressed to balls, to the Bouffons, to the Opera; her spiritual director allows her to combine the sacred and the profane. Always on good terms with the Church and the world, she is an incarnation of the present time, and seems to have taken the word Legality for her motto. The Marquise's conduct is marked by exactly enough devotion to enable her, under another Maintenon, to achieve the gloomy piety of the last days of Louis XIV, and enough worldliness to adopt the manners and gallantry of the earlier years of his reign, if they ever could return.