Short Stories: La Bourse (The Purse) and others [French English Bilingual Edition]

This collection brings together three titles that are part of the Private Life (Scènes de la Vie de Privée) subseries of La Comédie Humaine. They are published in the years 1832-1833. The titles are:
1) La Bourse (The Purse)
2) Le Message (The Message)
3) La Grenadière (La Grenadière)
La Bourse (The Purse) is a subtle story in which an artist must try and make sense of the conflicting signs he observes in Madame de Rouville's apartment, as though he is trying to decipher a work of art, a theme Balzac will come back to in subsequent works.
For Le Message (The Message), Balzac says "I have always longed to tell a simple and true story, which should strike terror into two young lovers, and drive them to take refuge each in the other's heart, as two children cling together at the sight of a snake by a woodside."
La Grenadière (La Grenadière) is the countryside where a mother retreats with her two sons, for undisclosed reasons. Originally called Les Orphelins (The Orphans) in the manuscript, the title has been changed by Balzac afterwards for publication.

About This Edition
Project Bilingual (A division of Wolf Pup Books) is a continuing project making available great original French writers' texts along with their English translation. This edition, which offers after every original language paragraph its translation, makes both grammar and vocabulary checks as painless as possible. Idiomatic forms that could be overlooked can be easily detected.
Furthermore, large paragraphs have been broken down to much smaller units so that the check is as effortless as possible. We do hope that by reading French writers that defined the language itself or whose work permeated the French culture, you will be able to get the maximum benefit from this language series. Although this edition is not a replacement for traditional methods of learning language, it is a very powerful tool to speed up the process once you have attained the intermediate level and beyond.
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