The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Honoré de Balzac [best e book reader .txt] 📗

nd fits of creative energy. And then its pleasure, its repose,are an exhausting debauch, swarthy and black with blows, white withintoxication, or yellow with indigestion. It lasts but two days, butit steals to-morrow's bread, the week's soup, the wife's dress, thechild's wretched rags. Men, born doubtless to be beautiful--for allcreatures have a relative beauty--are enrolled from their childhoodbeneath the yoke of force, beneath the rule of the hammer, the chisel,the loom, and have been promptly vulcanized. Is not Vulcan, with hishideousness and his strength, the emblem of this strong and hideousnation--sublime in its mechanical intelligence, patient in its season,and once in a century terrible, inflammable as gunpowder, and ripewith brandy for the madness of revolution, with wits enough, in fine,to take fire at a captious word, which signifies to it always: Goldand Pleasure! If we comprise in it all those who hold out their handsfor an alms, for lawful wages, or the five francs that are granted