0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Edmond About's "The Man With The Broken Ear" is a satirical novel intricately woven within the frameworks of 19th-century French literature. The narrative centers on the peculiar adventures of a man who discovers a dismembered ear, serving as both a literal and metaphorical symbol of the disjointed realities confronting society. About's prose is marked by his sharp wit and keen observational skills, intertwining humor with incisive social commentary. The literary style reflects the burgeoning realism of the era, revealing the absurdities and contradictions of human nature through an engaging plot that critiques contemporary values and ideologies. Edmond About, a prominent figure of the French literary scene and a journalist, was deeply influenced by the turbulent political climate of his time, including the rise of the Second Empire. His experiences in journalism and travel allowed him to cultivate a discerning perspective on societal norms, which is palpable in his writing. Through this novel, About seeks to expose the frivolities of bourgeois society, drawing from his own encounters and observations to forge a narrative that is both personal and universal, resonating with the human condition. Readers seeking a multifaceted exploration of society's eccentricities will find "The Man With The Broken Ear" to be an illuminating and entertaining experience. About deftly combines absurdity with profound insights, making this novel a recommended read for those interested in the interplay between humor and social critique in literature. This work not only offers a glimpse into the absurdity of 19th-century French culture but also serves as a timeless commentary on the follies of humanity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
The Man With The Broken Ear
Table of Contents
Introduction
When a relic of the past awakens in a world certain of its superiority, the real experiment tests not the revived body but the living age—its science and institutions, its polite hypocrisies and heated patriotisms, its tender illusions about love, honor, and historical memory—revealing how the measure of progress is less the novelty of inventions than the capacity to understand what time changes, what it merely rearranges, and what stubbornly resists the march that societies like to call modernity.
The Man With The Broken Ear, originally published in French as L’Homme à l’oreille cassée, is a satirical novel with a speculative premise by Edmond About, a prominent nineteenth‑century French novelist and journalist. It appeared in the early 1860s, in the milieu of Second Empire France, when confidence in scientific advances mingled with anxieties about social change. Bridging the Napoleonic past and About’s contemporary moment, the book blends domestic comedy with a lightly scientific conceit. Its setting moves between salons, laboratories, and public spaces shaped by bureaucracy and opinion, creating a stage on which old ideals and modern habits can comically test each other.
The premise is disarmingly simple: an ambitious technique for preserving life brings a soldier from the Napoleonic era into the everyday reality of a later generation. A household, curious onlookers, and men of learning are drawn into the consequences of this revival. At first, the curiosity is scientific and social—can the method work, and what sort of person would time return to them? Soon the focus widens to the practical and moral: how does one receive a human being from another age, and what obligations arise when the past no longer lies safely in books and monuments?
About’s narrative voice is lucid, brisk, and quietly mischievous, favoring irony over invective and observation over ornament. He uses the speculative device not for technical display but to set up encounters, misunderstandings, and debates whose humor grows from character and custom. Scenes glide from drawing‑room conversation to public fuss with an ease that keeps the pace lively. The style invites the reader to enjoy the comedy while registering the small vibrations of anxiety that modernization can produce. It is entertainment sharpened by intelligence: a smile that also measures the surrounding world.
Beneath its comic surface the novel engages themes that resonate beyond its century. It weighs the claims of modern progress against the authority of memory and habit, asking how societies make legends of their past and what happens when those legends meet living counterexamples. It questions the reach and limits of scientific ambition, especially when applied to human lives and reputations. It explores codes of honor, the uses of patriotism, and the friction between private affections and public narratives. Above all, it contemplates identity as something formed in time yet tested by encounters that time itself should have prevented.
Readers today may recognize in its questions an enduring relevance: how new technologies unsettle relationships, how public myth‑making shapes personal destiny, how communities reconcile admiration for history with the demands of the present. The book offers a way to think about progress without cynicism and to prize tradition without nostalgia. Its speculative spark will appeal to readers of early science‑inflected fiction, while its social wit will suit admirers of nineteenth‑century comedy of manners. The mood remains buoyant even as it prompts reflection, making the experience both companionable and quietly probing.
Approached as an introduction to Edmond About’s art, this novel showcases a writer who could smuggle serious inquiry into a light, inviting form. The setup alone—reviving a figure from a celebrated past and watching him move among the self‑assured present—supplies ample charm and provocation without requiring specialized knowledge. It is a story that entertains at the surface while offering durable questions beneath. For readers curious about how fiction can make time itself a character, The Man With The Broken Ear provides a clear, witty, and surprisingly fresh conversation between eras that still has much to say.
Synopsis
Set in mid nineteenth century France, the narrative opens in a quiet provincial household that acquires at auction an old cabinet filled with curiosities. Hidden within is a desiccated human figure, wrapped with documents left by a forgotten physician who describes an experimental method for preserving life in a suspended state. The family includes a prudent father, an inquisitive daughter, and her fiancé, a promising young engineer eager to prove himself. What begins as a domestic anecdote quickly becomes a scientific puzzle and a social dilemma, as curiosity, ambition, and a sense of duty push the household to consider reviving the mysterious officer.
Guided by the papers, a sympathetic doctor and the engineer cautiously replicate the prescribed steps, balancing heat, baths, stimulants, and carefully measured electric currents. Their work unfolds methodically, with the family alternating between anxious watchfulness and practical support. The ethical stakes are debated in hushed conversations about responsibility, consent, and the possible consequences of success. After a sequence of near failures and faint responses, the body begins to show unmistakable signs of returning vitality. Breath, pulse, and awareness appear in fits and starts. The experiment, once a theoretical curiosity, becomes an urgent fact, placing the household at the center of an extraordinary event.
The revived man identifies himself as Colonel Fougas, a veteran of the campaigns of 1813, injured in battle and preserved by the very method described in the papers. He bears a distinctive damaged ear, lending the tale its title and serving as a marker of identity. For him, scarcely an hour seems to have passed since captivity, while decades have transformed the country. He speaks with the assurance of a soldier of the Empire, animated by loyalty, courage, and a precise sense of honor. Grateful and astonished, he nevertheless expects the deference due to his rank and struggles to situate himself in the altered world.
The hosts, compelled by humanity and circumstance, make room for Fougas and shield him from immediate public attention. Their routines, finances, and plans are soon strained by the needs of a guest who is both fragile and forceful. The engagement between the young pair, once straightforward, becomes complicated by Fougas’s presence, temperament, and magnetism. He introduces opinions on marriage, duty, and social conduct that do not align with contemporary manners. The father vacillates between caution and opportunity, weighing the risks and possible prestige of association with a living relic from the Empire, even as the household seeks equilibrium amid growing disruption.
Inevitably, the news escapes the home and spreads swiftly. Newspapers turn the miracle into sensation, scientists request examinations, and officials worry about precedents. Questions proliferate. Is Fougas truly the officer named in the documents or an impostor enabled by coincidence Similar veterans and old records are consulted. What rights and obligations attach to a man displaced from time Who owns his effects and any claims they imply Medical experts argue about the procedure, while lawyers debate citizenship, age, property, and legal identity. The revived colonel becomes a public case and a test for institutions attempting to reconcile curiosity with order.
Released into broader society, Fougas confronts railways, the telegraph, new money, and altered hierarchies. He moves through salons, cafés, and offices, each encounter revealing a contrast between his martial directness and a world driven by commerce, calculation, and fashion. He interprets events in imperial terms and attempts, with mixed reception, to rekindle patriotic feeling. Courtesies mask skepticism, while bureaucratic routines frustrate his impatience. The novel uses his wanderings for satirical observation, portraying mid century France as ingenious, prosperous, and amnesiac. Fougas, in turn, tests the nation’s self image, provoking reflections on progress, memory, and the debts the living owe the past.
Amid the public excitement, the private drama intensifies. A pledge made in lighthearted confidence, or interpreted more strictly by Fougas, entangles him in the destiny of the engaged couple. His uncompromising notion of honor challenges the flexible etiquette of his hosts, and misunderstandings threaten to turn gratitude into rivalry. The father, attentive to reputation and advantage, calculates the benefits of alliance, while the young lovers cling to their mutual trust under scrutiny. Social expectations, dowries, and legal uncertainties press upon them. The colonel’s presence magnifies every doubt, forcing choices between convenience and sincerity, and shifting the family’s priorities with each new development.
Efforts to confirm Fougas’s history lead to a careful audit of archives, correspondence, and surviving witnesses. The search spans garrisons, hospitals, and provincial towns, lingering near former battlefields where memory is contested. Old comrades are found aged and altered, and some recollections clash. An earlier attachment or family tie resurfaces, raising questions about promises, debts, and the pull of earlier loyalties. Documentation accumulates, clarifying names, dates, and scars, yet decisive recognition also requires humane judgment. These inquiries, though factual in appearance, expose moral dilemmas about identity, continuity, and the obligations that span generations, steering the story toward choices with lasting consequences.
The closing movements gather personal and public threads into a resolution that avoids spectacle and favors balance. Without disclosing the specific outcomes, the novel brings its conflicts to rest by pairing generosity with prudence and allowing characters to accept limits as well as possibilities. Scientific prowess proves impressive but not omnipotent, and social order absorbs novelty while protecting its rules. Fougas’s singular fate highlights adaptability, gratitude, and the need to reconcile past greatness with present realities. The tone remains brisk and even, mixing humor with earnestness, and the book concludes as a reflection on progress tempered by memory and on dignity preserved through change.
Historical Context
Set primarily in France during the early 1860s, under the Second Empire of Napoleon III (1852–1870), the narrative moves between provincial society and a Paris being refashioned as a showcase of imperial modernity. The atmosphere combined rapid industrial growth, railway expansion, and administrative centralization with authoritarian political control. From 1853, Baron Haussmann’s transformations of Paris embodied the regime’s confidence, while recent military exploits enhanced prestige. Yet social memory remained saturated with the First Empire and its wars. Into this milieu, the sudden return of a Napoleonic officer from the 1810s tests the manners, legal frameworks, and political assumptions of the time, juxtaposing triumphalist present with unresolved revolutionary legacies.
From 1803 to 1815, the Napoleonic Wars reordered Europe. The Grande Armée, built on mass conscription and meritocratic promotion, won decisive victories at Austerlitz (2 December 1805), Jena-Auerstedt (14 October 1806), and Wagram (5–6 July 1809). French administration exported the Civil Code, redrew borders, and installed client monarchies from Madrid to Warsaw. Honor, discipline, and glory framed masculine identities for officers and conscripts alike. The novel channels this martial ethos through its Napoleonic protagonist, whose habits of command, dueling codes, and devotion to the Emperor reflect the culture forged in campaign bivouacs and headquarters, setting up a clash with the pragmatic, transactional bourgeois values that dominate the 1860s.
The 1812 invasion of Russia marked the strategic turning point. Napoleon crossed the Niemen on 24 June 1812, entered an evacuated Moscow on 14 September, and retreated amid scorched earth and winter. Catastrophe peaked at the Berezina crossing, 26–29 November 1812. The 1813 German campaign culminated in the Battle of Leipzig, 16–19 October, where coalition forces defeated France; tens of thousands of French troops were killed, wounded, or captured across these campaigns. Prisoners were marched to depots in Prussia and into Russia, often facing disease and privation. The book imagines a French officer captured around this time and preserved by a scientific curiosity, making his reappearance a living relic of the collapse of Napoleonic power.
Napoleon abdicated in April 1814, briefly returned for the Hundred Days in 1815, and was finally defeated at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 before exile to Saint Helena, where he died in 1821. Under the Bourbon Restoration (1814–1830), amnesties, purges, and political oscillation left many veterans marginalized, while a Bonapartist cult grew in private circles and public memory. Its apogee was the Retour des cendres of 1840, when Louis-Philippe repatriated Napoleon’s remains to Les Invalides in Paris. The revived officer in the narrative carries unwavering Bonapartist loyalties into a society that simultaneously venerates the myth and rejects its disruptive politics, generating conflicts over honor, rank, and the meaning of fidelity after regime change.
The upheavals of 1848 reshaped France. The February Revolution toppled King Louis-Philippe, the Second Republic was proclaimed, and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte won the presidential election in December 1848. His coup on 2 December 1851 dismantled the Republic; the Second Empire followed on 2 December 1852. The regime pursued modernization and glory: Paris was rebuilt under Haussmann, France fought in the Crimean War (1853–1856), and aided Italian unification by victories at Magenta (4 June 1859) and Solferino (24 June 1859). Published in 1862, the novel reflects this context by satirizing official decorum, uniforms and decorations, and the calculations of families seeking advancement within a centralized, plebiscitary, and image-conscious imperial state.
The rise of Prussia transformed European power balances in the 1860s. King Wilhelm I reigned from 1861; Albrecht von Roon and Helmuth von Moltke modernized the army, emphasizing rail mobilization and the Dreyse needle gun. Otto von Bismarck became Minister-President on 23 September 1862, steering a Realpolitik course. Quick victories followed in the Danish War of 1864 and the Austro-Prussian War, decided at Königgrätz on 3 July 1866; the North German Confederation formed in 1867, and a crisis with France over Luxembourg erupted the same year. The book mirrors anxieties about German militarism and pedantic authority, foreshadowing the conflict that would explode in 1870 and echoing About’s broader public critiques of Prussia.
Two institutional frameworks shape the story’s tensions: civil law and military service. French civil status registers, introduced in 1792 and organized by the Civil Code of 1804, governed identity, marriage, succession, and death. Courts routinely adjudicated presumptions of death, remarriage, and inheritance when absent persons reappeared, highlighting the law’s dependence on paperwork and witnesses. Conscription, reorganized repeatedly since the Revolutionary levies and regulated in the 1850s recruitment laws, permitted paid replacement, allowing wealthy draftees to hire substitutes. This system sharpened class divides and commodified patriotic duty. By resurrecting a soldier from the 1810s into the 1860s, the narrative exposes both legal uncertainties of personhood and the inequity embedded in service obligations.
As social and political critique, the book uses anachronism to test mid-century France. It punctures Bonapartist nostalgia by showing the cost of perpetual mobilization, mocks bureaucratic legalism that treats personhood as a docket, and scrutinizes the Second Empire’s deference to rank, decoration, and money. The revived officer’s rigid honor code collides with a society accustomed to compromise, purchase of military exemptions, and opportunistic loyalty, revealing class privileges and moral evasions. The fascination with scientific control over life becomes a caution about technocratic hubris serving bourgeois comfort. In confronting war memory, legal order, and social ambition, the work dissects the fractures of 1860s France with sardonic precision.
