Balzac tidbits.

I love Balzac, both how he classes up the world into discernible chunks and patterns with their own logic that you have to grasp, and how so much of his observations about behavior are super aphoristic and perceptive but are stuff you wouldn't necessarily actually think up yourself.

Lately, I've been reading "The Chouans," and I creased the page down at two points:

- Someone says that "[c]ast down among the debris of a ruined world, he aspires to build the future from the past."

(This is so like so many nostalgic, neurotic people I've seen, especially among the political machine.)

- The narratorial voice observes about a character, "[s]he was led [to a place] by that strange compulsion, as if a spell were laid on us, which makes us look for hope where hope is an absurdity. Daydreams conceived under that enchantment often come true, and then we call them prescience and attribute our prevision to the operation of a real though inexplicable force, a force that the passions always find ready to favour them, like a flatterer who among all his lies sometimes tells the truth."

(This was me, with my recent campaign.)

. . .

I find the setting of this novel interesting, in northwest France during a time of guerilla warfare after the French Revolution.

It's much earlier than his other novels - it was his first major one - and it has such an odd and such a military setting.  Very different, and very Sir Walter Scott it seems, though I've never read any Scott and I don't think I'd like him.