Fiction · 1830
A Passion in the Desert
Honoré de Balzac · translated by Ernest Christopher Dowson
A soldier of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign is taken by the Maugrabins, escapes on a stolen horse into the desert, and wakes in a cave among palms to find that it is already occupied by a panther. Unable to reach his carbine and unwilling to try the sand again, he sets about making terms with her — a scratch behind the ears, a share of the food, a name, Mignonne, borrowed from a mistress in Paris. The story is told at one remove, by a man explaining to a companion why a menagerie performance did not surprise him.
Honoré de Balzac published Une passion dans le désert in 1830 and later placed it among the Scènes de la vie militaire of La Comédie humaine. It is one of his shortest pieces and his strangest, and it ends with a line about the desert that has outlived the rest of the tale. This edition is Ernest Dowson's English translation.
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About the author
1799–1850 · Romantic
Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) naît à Tours. Après des études de droit, il se lance dans l’imprimerie et l’édition ; ces entreprises échouent et le laissent, dès 1828, endetté de plus de soixante mille francs. Il revient à l’écriture : Les Chouans (1829) est son premier roman publié sous son nom. Il conçoit ensuite La Comédie humaine, un cycle de plus de quatre-vingt-dix romans et nouvelles retraçant la société française de son temps, dont Eugénie Grandet (1833) et Le Père Goriot (1835). Après dix-huit ans de correspondance, il épouse la comtesse polonaise Ewelina Hańska en mars 1850 ; il meurt à Paris cinq mois plus tard.
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