Paris+Gold+Grain Metaphor =What book?

May 9, 2008 5:03 PM

What book is this? I remember an intro that describes Paris, focuses on gold, and has some analogy about the city's inhabitants being like wheat or grain.

This is driving me crazy- I can remember the imagery but not the title or author. This was, I believe a book written more than 80 years ago, but not more than 300. I'd guess somewhere in the 1800s. Maybe I'm mixing up some detail, but I don't think so. I think the description is even in the first page of this book (I read it in college years ago) but my searches have turned up nothing. Paris+Gold+(some grain)Metaphor for humanity=?

posted by conch soup to media & arts (4 comments total)

Could it be Les Miserables?
posted by phoenixy at 6:05 PM on May 9

How about Joyce's Ulysses?

"His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.

Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled conquistadores."
posted by suedehead at 9:56 PM on May 9

Hey suedehead! That's not it but you've helped me find it- the 'skulls' mention in Ulysses reminded me that there may have been some reaper imagery to go along with the grain analogy, and lo and behold, the first paragraph of Balzac's "The girl with the Golden Eyes":

One of those sights in which most horror is to be encountered is, surely, the general aspect of the Parisian populace–a people fearful to behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, masks of hypocrisy; all alike worn and stamped with the indelible signs of a panting cupidity? What is it they want? Gold or pleasure? A few observations upon the soul of Paris may explain the causes of its cadaverous physiognomy, which has but two ages–youth and decay: youth, wan and colorless; decay, painted to seem young.
posted by conch soup at 5:10 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]

Great quote, and Balzac will now most certainly be on my summer reading list. Thank you!
posted by suedehead at 10:02 PM on May 10