Shine and poverty of courtesans. Balzac O. de

In the huge cycle of Honore de Balzac “Human Comedy”, the book “The Brill between Curtains” occupies a special place. The heads of this brilliant fruit-fuel novel with a tense intrigue, almost a detective plot and a large number of actors were printed in Parisian newspapers for ten years. As a result, a merciless-realist portrait of Paris on the eve of the July Revolution of 1830 arose, with its brilliant balls and dirty, barely lit by beggar zoos, secular beauties and sales women, usurors and young ambitious people, aristocrats, bankers, police, convicts. In this city, everything, even love and virtue are put up for sale, and the moral of those who are called the cream of society differs little from the morals of the criminal world. The lyrical line of the novel is associated with the transformation of the fateful beauty of the courtesan, who loved the ambitious poet, and anticipates the main theme of “Ladies with Camellias” by A. Dumas-Sin.