In these two remarkable works, a brilliant, vain, long-suffering Frenchman describes the first twenty years of his life and their culmination in a tortured love affair with a possessive older woman. Constant attempted to conceal the fact that these two books were autobiographical. To his friends and acquaintances, however, it was clear that Adolphe was really Benjamin himself. Constant was an able parliamentarian, a champion of liberalism and the author of The History of Religion. Posterit...

Adolphe is a privileged and refined young man, bored by the stupidity he perceives in the world around him. After a number of meaningless conquests, he at last encounters Ellenore, a beautiful and passionate older woman. Adolphe is enraptured and gradually wears down her resistance to his declarations of love. But as they embark on an intense and tortured affair, Ellenore gives way to a flood of emotion that only serves to repel her younger lover - yet he cannot bring himself to leave her ...

We are such volatile creatures that we finally feel the sentiments we feign.First published in 1816, Adolphe is the story of a young man with all the privileges and advantages of a noble birth, bt who's still haunted by the meaninglessness of life. He seeks distraction in the pursuit of the beautiful, but older and married Ellenore, a fictionalized version of Madame de Stael. The young Adolphe, inexperienced in love, falls for her unexpectedly and falters ...

Plusieurs écrivains, entraînés par l’amour de l’humanité dans de louables exagérations, n’ont envisagéla guerre que sous ses côtés funestes. Je reconnois volontiers ses avantages.Il n’est pas vrai que la guerre soit toujours un mal. À de certaines époques de l’espèce humaine, elleest dans la nature de l’homme. Elle favorise alors le développement de ses plus belles et de ses plusgrandes facultés. Elle lui ouvre un trésor de précieuses jouissances. Elle le forme ...

Published posthumously, The Red Notebook is an account of the youth of the author of the seminal Romantic novel Adolphe, relating Constant’s eccentric and peripatetic education, his introduction to European high society and the kindling of his literary ambitions as well as his often comic and calamitous early experiences with the opposite sex and the development of his ruinous gambling habit.Part picaresque romp and part Bildungsroman, this is a spirited look at life and Romantic sensibili...

pubOne.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. HE had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure. Celebrations and suppressions were equally painful to him, and but one of the former found a place in his life. He had kept each year in his own fashion the date of Mary Antrim's death. It would be more to the point perhaps to say that this occasion kept HIM: it kept him at lea...

An entangling narrative about love, revenge and despair. The novel revolves around the life of the protagonist whose life is centered on avenging the death of his father. The shattering of childhood fantasies and the anguish that follows is captured in a heart-rending manner. Captivating!

Henry James was born on 15 April 1843 as is regarded as one of the great literary figures of 19th Century writing. Born in New York, he moved between there and Europe, being tutored in Geneva, London, Paris, Bologna, and Bonn. At the age of 19 he briefly attended Harvard Law School, but preferred reading literature to studying law and settled the next year in England. He became a British subject in 1915, a year before his death on 28th February 1916. As well as an outstanding author he was a...

A young man, tired of life and love, indifferent to the people and world around him, takes up a room in a Parisienne boarding house. Noises from the adjoining room draw his attention to a hole in the wall, and he observes its occupants through it. He becomes obsessed with the individual episodes of human life that play out before his eyes; love, adultery, incest, childbirth, death, thievery and betrayal. Through his voyeurism, the unnamed narrator becomes an omniscient godlike character, o...

Published in 1782, just years before the French Revolution, Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a disturbing and ultimately damning portrayal of a decadent society. At its centre are two aristocrats, former lovers, who embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded existences. While the Marquise de Merteuil challenges the Vicomte de Valmont to seduce an innocent convent girl, the Vicomte is also occupied with the conquest of a virtuous married woman....

From the private papers of Jane Austen and Mozart to those of Anne Boleyn and Nelson, Love Letters of Great Men and Women collects together some of the most romantic letters in history.For some of these great men, love is a ‘delicious poison’ (William Congreve); for others, ‘a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music’ (Charles Darwin). Love can scorch like the heat of the sun (Henry VIII), or penetrate the depths of one’s heart like a cooling rain (Flaubert...

After a period of forced exile and solitary wandering brought about by his radical views on religion and politics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau returned to Paris in 1770. Here, in the last two years of his life, he wrote his final work, the Reveries. In this eloquent masterpiece the great political thinker describes his sense of isolation from a society he felt had rejected his writings - and the manner in which he has come to terms with his alienation, as he walks around Paris, gazing at plants,...