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Thursday 28 July 2011

Exotic Lancashire vamp

Balzac - from Wikipedia


No - it isn't the person in the above picture - that's Balzac and he wasn't at all exotic. 


In his novel Le Lys dans la Vallée (The Lily of the Valley), Honoré de Balzac creates a character called Lady Arabella Dudley. Lady Arabella is a beautiful, fiery aristocratic seductress with designs on the novel's hero. What more exotic origins could Balzac have given her than a Lancashire birthplace?

"I was born in Lancashire, a country where women die for love. Know you, and give you up? I will yield you to none, not even to Death, for I should die with you."



Le Lys dans la Vallée is part of La Comédie humaine, his vast collection of interlinked novels. 



2 comments:

David Duff said...

A true Lancashire lass, then!

A K Haart said...

Absolutely.