Meet the Guest Blogger

I spent most of the day in a car so I’ve commissioned a guest blogger—put your hands together in a big Underbelly welcome for French novelist Honoré de Balzac:

Alas! The colonel no longer loved anyone in the world except for one person and that person was himself. His misfortunes in Texas, his stay in New York, a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the very highest level, where the brutality of self-interest reaches the point of cynicism and where a man, fundamentally isolated from the rest of mankind, finds himself compelled to rely upon his own strength and at every instant to be the self-appointed judge of his own actions, a city in which politeness does not exist; in other words, the whole voyage, down to its very slightest details, had developed in Philippe the pernicious inclinations of the hardened trooper.

Honoré de Balzac, The Black Sheep 62

(Penguin Paperback ed. 1970)

It goes on like this. And you thought we had a low opinion of the French. So far as I know, Balzac never set foot in New York. Or in Bedford, New Hampshire either, come to think of it.