THE BROTHERHOOD OF CONSOLATION

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC


Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley




FIRST EPISODE

MADAME DE LA CHANTERIE



I

THE MALADY OF THE AGE

On a fine evening in the month of September, 1836, a man about thirty
years of age was leaning on the parapet of that quay from which a
spectator can look up the Seine from the Jardin des Plantes to
Notre-Dame, and down, along the vast perspective of the river, to the
Louvre. There is not another point of view to compare with it in the
capital of ideas. We feel ourselves on the quarter-deck, as it were,
of a gigantic vessel. We dream of Paris from the days of the Romans to