Honoré de Balzac

He was a short and corpulent man with a very large head and no neck.

In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac's Louis Lambert that all the world's great men had been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason.

Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart.

The shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one another.

The spectacle of Mr. Gladstone finding thirty-four rhymes to the name Margot seems to you rather pathetic than anything else.

Mallarmé's envelopes with their versified addresses leave you cold unless they leave you pitiful.

You can't see that Apte ne point te cabrer u Posté j'ajouterai dia Si tu ne fuis ons biru Balzac chez cet hérédia Is a little miracle.

You're right, said Mr. Scogin.

Uh, all of these things lead him to be intensely distrusted by both his teacher and his parents.

Um, when Doinel decides to leave school and his home after being somewhat falsely accused of plagiarizing Balzac, he is caught trying to return a typewriter that he stole.

[lip smack] Uh, very convoluted.

And he is eventually placed in a facility for troubled youths near the seashore.

Uh, we see the ways that his parents and, uh, particularly his teacher sort of like, you know, will criticize him and, and, you know, punish him for the ways that he's having these little outbursts.

Um, and I think that it's sort of up to the audience to, to kind of insert their own rationale for what this child is doing, right? Um, there's of course some sort of larger context around France being in this, um, weird period kind of post-World War II, where it is struggling to find the sort of, uh, and retain the sort of national identity that was so strong for so long and then m- certainly much weakened.

Um, I think there's, there's ties there certainly with like the references to Balzac, for example.

[lip smack] Um, but I think that, you know, this film really makes you confront, like, what do I think about, uh, this, this child who is, uh, acting in this way? Like, how do I choose to judge him? Um, what, what are my assumptions about what his life is like, what his childhood was like? Um, based on the sort of the very small interactions I see with the people around him, what sort of, uh, picture am I, I sort of building up here about what his life was like and his life, uh, is like based on those very small interactions? And I think that when you do that and you kind of come with an open mind, I think it's, it's sort of m- very transformative to the movie.

No doubt you could have proved me entitled to them with as little trouble as it has cost him to do it, but it would have been your disposition to hunt game of a higher quality.

Why, I even doubt if it is you who furnish me all that excellent information about Balzac and those others.

Now the style of M. Bourget and many other French writers is apparently a closed letter to Mark Twain, but let us leave that alone.

Has he read Erkmann Chatrian, Victor Hugo? Lamartine, Edmond About, Cherbullier, Renan.

Has he read Gustave Droz's Monsieur, Madame, et Bébé, and those books which leave for a long time a perfume about you? Has he read the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, George Sand, and Balzac? Has he read Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris? Has he read or heard the plays of Sandeau, Augier, Dumas, and Sardou, the works of those titans of modern literature whose names will be household words all over the world for hundreds of years to come? He has read La Terre, this kind-hearted, refined humorist.

When Mark Twain visits a garden, does he smell the violets, the roses, the jasmine, or the honeysuckle? No, he goes in the faraway corner where the soil is prepared.

Hear what he says.