Publisher's Synopsis
Gambara is a short story by Honoré de Balzac, first published in 1837 in the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris at the request of its editor Maurice Schlesinger. It is one of the Études philosophiques of La Comédie humaine. Schlesinger commissioned the novella to promote Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera, Les Huguenots, which he was also publishing. At the time of its publication, Balzac was going every week to the Théâtre des Italiens, watching the shows from the box of the Guidoboni-Visconti, Italian friends of his who had first met him in the Scala in Milan and at the shows in Venice. The text was edited into a single volume with le Cabinet des Antiques, published by éditions Souverain in 1839, before being published by édition Furne in 1846 in the Études philosophiques.
