Shine and poverty courtesans

In a vast cycle of Honore de Balzac's "Human Comedy" the book "Shine and poverty courtesans" occupies a special place. The head of this brilliant novel-feuilleton with intense intrigue, almost a detective story and a large number of actors were published in the Paris Newspapers for ten years. As a result there was a relentlessly realistic portrait of Paris on the eve of the July revolution of 1830, with his shiny balls and dirty, barely lit, squalid alleys, secular beauties and corrupt women, moneylenders and young ambitious men, aristocrats, bankers, policemen, convicts. In this city on sale everything, even love and virtue, and morality of those who are called the cream of society, not much different from the morals of the criminal world. Lyric line of the novel is connected with the transformation of a fatal beauty-courtesan, who loved the ambitious poet, anticipates the main theme of the "Lady of the Camelias" by Alexander Dumas son.