The Wrong Side of Paris (Modern Library) - Tapa dura

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

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

The first new translation of Balzac's novel in more than a century follows Godefroid, a thirty-year-old failure, who seeks refuge at the unusual lodging house of a tragic noblewomen, where he encounters an assortment of men, all scarred by the tumult that followed the French Revolution, who have dedicated their lives to anonymous acts of charity. 10,000 first printing.