Other editions of book At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

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The novella opens in Paris on the Rue Saint-Denis with a description of a very old house. Opposite the house, a young man stands in the pouring rain. He stares at the house, waiting for a glimpse of a young girl.In this story, Balzac examines how class differences impact the relationship between men and women and asks the question ‘does it take a particular kind of woman to live with a man of genius?’

Half-way down the Rue Saint-Denis, almost at the corner of the Ruedu Petit-Lion, there stood formerly one of those delightful houses whichenable historians to reconstruct old Paris by analogy. The threateningwalls of this tumbledown abode seemed to have been decorated withhieroglyphics. For what other name could the passer-by give to the Xsand Vs which the horizontal or diagonal timbers traced on the front,outlined by little parallel cracks in the plaster? It was evident that everybeam quivered in its mortices at the passing of the lightest vehicle. Thisvenerable structure was crowned by a triangular roof of which noexample will, ere long, be seen in Paris. This covering, warped by theextremes of the Paris climate, projected three feet over the roadway, asmuch to protect the threshold from the rainfall as to shelter the wall of aloft and its sill-less dormer-window. This upper story was built of planks,overlapping each other like slates, in order, no doubt, not to overweightthe frail house.

The plot for At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, if such a stately name can be given to so delicate a sketch, is of course open to downright British judgment to pronounce the self-sacriiice of Lebas more ignoblethan touching, the conduct of Théodore too childish to deserve the excuses sometimes possible for passionate inconstancy, and the character of Augustine angelically idiotic. The candew adorable which the Frenchman adores and exhibits in the girl the uncompromising, though mortal, passion of the woman are too different from any ideal that we have entertained, except for a very short period in the eighteenth century. Le Bal de Sceaux, with its satire on contempt for trade, is in some ways more like Balzacs young friend and pupil Charles de Bernard than like himself and I believe it attracted English notice pretty early.

The plot for At the Sign of the Cat and Racket, if such a stately name can be given to so delicate a sketch, is of course open to downright British judgment to pronounce the self-sacriiice of Lebas more ignoblethan touching, the conduct of Théodore too childish to deserve the excuses sometimes possible for passionate inconstancy, and the character of Augustine angelically idiotic. The candew adorable which the Frenchman adores and exhibits in the girl the uncompromising, though mortal, passion of the woman are too different from any ideal that we have entertained, except for a very short period in the eighteenth century. Le Bal de Sceaux, with its satire on contempt for trade, is in some ways more like Balzacs young friend and pupil Charles de Bernard than like himself and I believe it attracted English notice pretty early.