Sign-In
Cart
Horace: A New Translation
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 14 2025
Pages: 348
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.87 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Horace Dumontet arrives in Paris from the provinces at nineteen, full of republican ideals and literary ambitions, with his sister's dowry financing his education and his parents' hopes financing his vanity. He is charming, confident, and almost entirely without discipline. He claims to despise bourgeois mediocrity. He gambles, borrows, spends, and performs the drama of his life in the manner of a man who has mistaken style for substance.
His story is told by Théophile, a medical student who lives in the Latin Quarter with his mistress Eugénie and sees through Horace from their first conversation. He befriends him anyway. He continues to make excuses for him. He is not sure, even at the end, why.
Into the world that Théophile inhabits - a world of Saint-Simonian idealism, working-class solidarity, cholera wards, and genuine republican commitment - Horace arrives like a distorting mirror. Around him: Marthe, a grisette and former barmaid fleeing a brutal husband, whose survival of Horace's abandonment - she becomes pregnant; he disappears - was the novel's central scandal. Eugénie, whose clarity about Horace is never shaken and who is never allowed by the novel to be merely decorative. Jean Laravinière, the working-class republican who goes to the barricades of June 1832 at the Cloître Saint-Merri when the moment comes. Paul Arsène, the brilliant art student who gives up his vocation because his friends need him to earn. And the Vicomtesse Léonie de Chailly - drawn from life, from Sand's former friend Marie d'Agoult - who seduces Horace because his admiration flatters her and ruins his reputation when it stops.
Serialized in La Revue indépendante from November 1841 through March 1842 and published in book form that year, Horace scandalized its original audience not for its politics but for its refusal to punish Marthe: a woman who had lovers, bore a child without marriage, and was not, in Sand's telling, destroyed by any of it. The grisette who survived, who was helped, who ultimately prospered - this was a more radical proposal than anything Horace manages in three volumes of republican speeches.
Not translated into English until 1995, Horace belongs to Sand's most politically explicit period and remains one of the sharpest portraits of a certain kind of man: charming, intelligent, incapable of genuine commitment, and genuinely surprised when the world declines to confirm his opinion of himself.
Also from
Ferousse, Liam
Three Short Stories and One Novella (The Onyx Seal, Léa, A Story Without a Name, A Page of History): A New Translation
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules
Paperback
Also in
Fiction Anthologies
On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings
Pirsig, Robert M.
Pirsig, Wendy K.
Hardcover
James Weldon Johnson: Writings (Loa #145): The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man / Along This Way / Essays and Editorials / Selected Poems
Johnson, James Weldon
Hardcover
Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Stoker, Bram
Shelley, Mary
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Sez I to Myself: The Collected Essays of Frank and Malachy McCourt
McCourt, Frank
McCourt, Malachy
Hardcover
Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All.
Allen, Mel
Paperback
The Greek Tragedies: Seventeen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Sophocles
Euripides
Aeschylus
Paperback
Learn Russian with Beginner Stories: Interlinear Russian to English
Gettys, Serafima
Van Den End, Kees
Hyplern, Bermuda Word
Paperback
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews
Poe, Edgar Allan
Hardcover
Obvious Adams -- The Story of a Successful Businessman: New Business Edition
Updegraff, Robert R.
Paperback
Bookin' in the Big House: What I Learned Leading a Women's Prison Book Club
Devoto, Pat Cunningham
Paperback
Japanese Folktales for Language Learners: Bilingual Legends and Fables in Japanese and English (Free Online Audio Recording)
Sato, Anna
Sato, Eriko
Paperback
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, volume 1
Cubas, Cristina Fernández
Pedraza, Pilar
Fager, Anders
Paperback
The Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio (Facsimile Reprint)
Randall, E. O.
Randall, Emilius Oviatt
Paperback