The Wrong Side of Paris

“What a glorious find! Here is a tale of strange and wonderful passions, mystery, intrigue, and the dark night of the soul. In this fresh and fluent translation, Balzac’s masterful depiction of our human comedy proves once again that this giant of the nineteenth-century novel will always remain among the most modern of writers.”-Linda Coverdale “Smartly paced, passionately full of Parisian excitement, this brisk new translation proves that theFrench master never lost his powerful, teeming urgency. Balzac’s last novel deserves its posthumous place in La Comédie humaine.” -Burton Raffel“Baudelaire was surprised that Balzac’s reputation depended on passing for an “observer”; for me, the poet said of the novelist, his great virtue lies in the fact that he was a visionary, a passionate visionary. Such a judgment brings us, not face to face but as in a glass darkly, to the Master’s last, flagrantly figmentary fiction, wonderfully titled in English to form the revelatory equation: Paris = history. Mr. Stump has again triumphed over his material, which means that the material here stands forth in all its messy, enthralling richesse, and with excellent notes into the bargain, as Balzac would say.”-Richard Howard

Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), the great French novelist, was the author of The Human Comedy, a vast and delightful series of inter-connected novels that presents a comprehensive portrait of all walks of French society.

Jordan Stump, winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, is the translator of more than six French novels.

Adam Gopnik is the author of the national bestseller Paris to the Moon. He writes often on various subjects for The New Yorker.

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