Décors et accessoires du luxe chez Balzac
Setting and Luxury Furnishings in Balzac's Works

Summary/Abstract: In the architecture of La Comédie Humaine, description occupies a privileged place, due to both its weight in the narrative economy, and its functions. The abundance of descriptive elements – setting and objects – is sometimes deemed as a stylistic defect or a form of contempt for fictional artistic rules: criticism of the time rejected this accumulation of heterogenous elements, this descriptive meticulousness, this baroque narrative lacework, which often invades the story. With Balzac, the luxury description, a character by its own, is the object of a double endeavour, both metaphorical and psychological.

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