La Vendetta

Par Honoré de Balzac

1830. La Comédie humaine - Études de moeurs. Premier livre, Scènes de la vie privée - Tome I. Premier volume de l'édition Furne 1842
Ginevra Piombo fait la connaissance de Luigi Porta, réfugié dans l'atelier d'un peintre chez qui elle prend des leçons. Luigi Porta a été blessé à Waterloo. Ginevra le secourt, le protège, et veut le présenter à sa famille. Mais elle découvre que les familles Piombo et Porta sont ennemies. Malgré le refus et les menaces de son père, elle épouse Porta pour le meilleur et pour le pire...
 

• Langue: Français
• Éditeur: Elmac
• Date de sortie: 6 avr. 2020
• ISBN: 9781978365872

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

Avis sur La Vendetta

[leslie398 · Évaluation : 4 sur 5 étoiles]

I can sum up this novella for myself (for future reference) as a combination of 'Romeo & Juliet' with O. Henry's 'The Gift of the Magi'. The novella is melodrama and as such doesn't compare to Balzac's greater novels but I thought it deserved more than 3.5*. Maybe 3.7 but such hair-splitting has little value; I only mention it because I don't want others to take my 4* to mean I felt it was equal to most of my other 4* books. If you don't like melodrama, you won't like this. Balzac once again demonstrates his belief that marrying against parental and/or societal wishes is doomed to failure. Yet the portrait of Corsican ideas of vengence and the look at how life changed from 1800 under Napoleon to 1815 under the second restoration was fascinating. This background to the story raised it in my estimation.

[jasonlf · Évaluation : 5 sur 5 étoiles]

The best opening of any Balzac work I have read. And in some of the ensuing scenes, the most wooden melodrama of any Balzac work I have read, especially the scene where Ginevra confesses her love to her father who says she will die before him if she continues down this path. But there are numerous hints of the Balzac to come, most especially in the description of the relationship and backbiting between girls in Monsieur Servin’s painting class. There is an awful lot of Balzac worth reading before this – but if you’re looking for a short entrée or have read a bunch already, I would recommend this.

[starbox_2 · Évaluation : 3 sur 5 étoiles]

Readable if melodramatic novella, featuring a hot-blooded Corsican family who have settled in Paris after a bloody culmination to a vendetta back home. The old couple worship their lovely artistic daughter, Ginevra. Then one day she encounters a dashing soldier hiding from royalists in the lumber room at her art school...Not up to the fabulous standard of some of Balzac's novels, but OK.

[nosajeel · Évaluation : 5 sur 5 étoiles]

The best opening of any Balzac work I have read. And in some of the ensuing scenes, the most wooden melodrama of any Balzac work I have read, especially the scene where Ginevra confesses her love to her father who says she will die before him if she continues down this path. But there are numerous hints of the Balzac to come, most especially in the description of the relationship and backbiting between girls in Monsieur Servin