Books with title At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

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

The artist Théodore de Sommervieux falls deeply in love with Augustine Guillaume, the daughter of a cloth merchant, whose business on the Rue Saint-Denis in Paris is known by sign of the Cat and Racket. Any profits generated from the sale of this book will go towards the Freeriver Community project, a project designed to promote harmonious community living and well-being in the world. To learn more about the Freeriver project please visit the website - www.freerivercommunity.com

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.