Domestic Peace

By De Balzac, Honore

Book Id: WPLBN0000677991
Format Type: PDF eBook
File Size: 159.71 KB.
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	Domestic Peace
Author:	De Balzac, Honore
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Literature, Literature & drama
Collections:	Penn State University's Electronic Classics Series Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Penn State University's Electronic Classics


Citation APA MLA Chicago Balzac, H. D. (n.d.). Domestic Peace. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.us/

Excerpt
Excerpt: The incident recorded in this sketch took place towards the end of the month of November, 1809, the moment when Napoleon?s fugitive empire attained the apogee of its splendor. The trumpet-blasts of Wagram were still sounding an echo in the heart of the Austrian monarchy. Peace was being signed between France and the Coalition. Kings and princes came to perform their orbits, like stars, round Napoleon, who gave himself the pleasure of dragging all Europe in his train--a magnificent experiment in the power he afterwards displayed at Dresden. Never, as contemporaries tell us, did Paris see entertainments more superb than those which preceded and followed the sovereign?s marriage with an Austrian archduchess. Never, in the most splendid days of the Monarchy, had so many crowned heads thronged the shores of the Seine, never had the French aristocracy been so rich or so splendid. The diamonds lavishly scattered over the women?s dresses, and the gold and silver embroidery on the uniforms contrasted so strongly with the penury of the Republic, that the wealth of the globe seemed to be rolling through the drawing-rooms of Paris. Intoxication seemed to have turned the brains of this Empire of a day.