Items related to Le Colonel Chabert
Synopsis
The story of a French military hero of the Napoleonic Wars, long assumed to be dead, tries to recover his fortune and former wife through the help of a famous Parisian lawyer.
Colonel Chabert, a Napoleonic War hero supposedly killed in the Battle of Eylau, returns to Paris after a long convalescence to find his wife remarried, and his pension gone. He employs a young, well-known lawyer to at least reclaim his pension. It is a game of wits: first to convince the lawyer that he is who he says he is; secondly to get his wife to admit to his identity and thereby give up some of her wealth. Once the lawyer believes Chabert's story, the wife must be made to part with his pension..."synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
From the Back Cover
Balzac once referred to art as "nature concentrated". And nowhere did his own art achieve such a rarefied state as in Colonel Chabert - one of the celebrated "Scenes from Private Life" from La Comedie Humaine. Chabert is among Balzac's most tragic heroes: a decorated Napoleonic War veteran believed to have been killed in battle. Severely disfigured, the Colonel, returns to Paris as if risen from the grave. There he finds his wife remarried, his pension gone, and his name linked nostalgically to the faded days of Empire. Employing a young lawyer named Derville, Chabert finds an ally to negotiate the labyrinthine system of Restoration justice; but as Derville plays the game of law and intrigue, we discover why Balzac himself thought that most post-Revolutionary politics were plagued with corruption. Chabert, despite his dignity, his history, his status as a fallen warrior, is no match for a society driven by the wiles of lawyers.
About the Author
Honore de Balzac was a French novelist and one of the creators of Realism in literature. His “Human Comedy” spanned more than 90 novels and short stories in an attempt to comprehend and depict the realities of life in modern bourgeois France.
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