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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Muse of the Department by Honore de Balzac: as a journalist, I have launched above a hundred articles against the
writers you speak of; but I confess that in attacking them it was to
attempt something like criticism. Be just; if you condemn them, you
must condemn Homer, whose /Iliad/ turns on Helen of Troy; you must
condemn Milton's /Paradise Lost/. Eve and her serpent seem to me a
pretty little case of symbolical adultery; you must suppress the
Psalms of David, inspired by the highly adulterous love affairs of
that Louis XIV. of Judah; you must make a bonfire of /Mithridate, le
Tartuffe, l'Ecole des Femmes, Phedre, Andromaque, le Mariage de
Figaro/, Dante's /Inferno/, Petrarch's Sonnets, all the works of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, the romances of the Middle Ages, the History of
The Muse of the Department |
