num_pages: 108
description: Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is, surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace - a people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages - youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young. In looking at this excavated people, foreigners, who are not prone to reflection, experience at first a movement of disgust towards the capital, that vast workshop of delights, from which, in a short time, they cannot even extricate themselves, and where they stay willingly to be corrupted. A few words will suffice to justify physiologically the almost infernal hue of Parisian faces, for it is not in mere sport that Paris has been called a hell. Take the phrase for truth.
language: English
title: The Girl With The Golden Eyes
titlecomplete: The Girl With The Golden Eyes
characters: Marquise de San-Réal, Henri de Marsay, Ferragus XXIII, Marquis de Roquenrolles, Paquita Valdez, Lord Dudley
genres: Literature, Classics, Queer, Novels, 19th Century, France, French Literature, Fiction, Novella, Romance
ratings_count: 1840
series: La Comédie Humaine, The Thirteen, Études de mœurs : Scènes de la vie parisienne
publisher: 1st World Library - Literary Society