chanel watches Corresponding to the character of the regime was the practical nature of the public w

Corresponding to the character of the regime was the practical nature of the public works executed — the railway system with its transformation of trade, the fortification of the capital, the commencement of popular education, and the renovation of decayed or incompleted edifices. Unfortunately, the rapidity of the development and the rush of speculation prevented any co-ordinating method in the effort, so that the epoch was poor in its architectural achievement compared with what had been produced in the past. Even other branches of art were greatest in satire. Daumier’s Robert Macaire sketches and the Mayeux of Travies had large material supplied them in the various types of citizen, greedy of pleasure and gold. The mot: “Enrichissez-vous,” attributed to Guizot, was the axiom of the time, accepted as the nec plus ultra by the vast majority of people. It invaded all circles with its lowering expedience; and he who was to depict its effects most puissantly did not escape its thrall.
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When Balzac began to write, no French novelist had a reputation as such that might be considered great. Up to the epoch of the Restoration, the novel had been declared to be an inferior species of literature, and no author had dreamed of basing his claims to fame on fiction. Lesage had been and was still appreciated rather on the ground of his satire; and the Abbe Prevost, his slightly younger contemporary, received but little credit in his lifetime for the Manon Lescaut that posterity was to prize. Throughout the eighteenth century, he was chiefly regarded as a literary hack who had translated Richardson’s Pamela and done things of a similar kind to earn his livelihood. Rousseau too was esteemed less for his Nouvelle Heloise than for his political disquisitions. No novelist since 1635 had ever been elected to the French Academy on account of his stories. Jules Sandeau was the first to break the tradition by his entrance among the Immortals in 1859, to be followed in 1862 by Octave Feuillet.
Lesage was the writer who introduced into France with his Gil Blas what has been called the personal novel — in other words, that story of adventures of which the narrator is the hero, the aim of the story being to illustrate first and foremost the vicissitudes of life in general and those of a single person in particular. The subsequent introduction of letters into the personal novel, which allowed more than one character to assume the narrator’s role, brought about a change which those who initiated it scarcely anticipated. Together with the larger interest, due to there being several narrators, came a tendency to introspection and analysis, diminishing the prominence of the facts and enhancing the effect produced by these facts on the thoughts and feelings of the characters. It was this development of the personal novel at the commencement of the nineteenth century, exhibited in Chateaubriand’s Rene, Madame de Stael’s Corinne, Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe, George Sand’s Indiana, and Sainte-Beuve’s Volupte, which contributed so much to create and establish the Romantic School of fiction with its egoistic lyricism.