Honore de Balzac: Mothers, Husbands, Talent and Orangutans...

These volumes in the William Amory Gardner Collection at Groton School are bound in Moroccan goatskin, have handmarbled endpapers, and remind us of a few insights worth considering:

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.