A Passion in the Desert

(Hardback)

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A Passion in the Desert (1830) is a short story by French author Honor de Balzac. Written as part of his La Comdie humaine sequence, A Passion in the Desert is a frequently anthologized work of short fiction that explores humanitys relationship with nature as well as the effects of conquest and colonization. The story was loosely adapted into a 1997 feature film and remains one of Balzacs most acclaimed works. The storys frame narrative begins after a man and woman attend a menagerie in Paris. The woman is horrified by what she has seen: a man working with a tamed hyena as though it were human. Her companion, the storys narrator, reveals his experience in these matters, and agrees to tell her a tale reported to him by a crippled veteran of Napoleons conquests. This soldier, he explains, was captured by Ottoman forces during the emperors campaign in Egypt. Managing to escape, he fled across the desert on horseback toward the safety of the Nile. When his horse died from exhaustion, he continued on foot and discovered, in the damp protection of a cave, a sleeping panther. Terrified at first, he slowly came to an understanding with the creature, learning to live at her side without angering her or falling prey to her animal hunger. One day, however, emerging from the cave to admire an eagle in flight, he is struck with the feeling that the panther had become jealous, and devises a plan to escape her inevitable wrath. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Honor de Balzacs A Passion in the Desert is a classic of French literature reimagined for modern readers.

Author Bio

Honor 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, mile 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 Comdie 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.