The Project Gutenberg EBook of An Historical Mystery, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: An Historical Mystery

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: March, 1998 [Etext #1678]
Posting Date: February 28, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN HISTORICAL MYSTERY ***

Produced by John Bickers, Dagny, and Bonnie Sala

AN HISTORICAL MYSTERY

(The Gondreville Mystery)

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To Monsieur de Margone.

In grateful remembrance, from his guest at the Chateau de Sache.

De Balzac.

AN HISTORICAL MYSTERY

PART I

CHAPTER I. JUDAS

The autumn of the year 1803 was one of the finest in the early part of
that period of the present century which we now call "Empire." Rain had
refreshed the earth during the month of October, so that the trees were
still green and leafy in November. The French people were beginning to
put faith in a secret understanding between the skies and Bonaparte,
then declared Consul for life,--a belief in which that man owes part of
his prestige; strange to say, on the day the sun failed him, in 1812,
his luck ceased!

About four in the afternoon on the fifteenth of November, 1803, the sun
was casting what looked like scarlet dust upon the venerable tops of
four rows of elms in a long baronial avenue, and sparkling on the sand
and grassy places of an immense _rond-point_, such as we often see in
the country where land is cheap enough to be sacrificed to ornament. The
air was so pure, the atmosphere so tempered that a family was sitting
out of doors as if it were summer. A man dressed in a hunting-jacket of
green drilling with green buttons, and breeches of the same stuff, and
wearing shoes with thin soles and gaiters to the knee, was cleaning a
gun with the minute care a skilful huntsman gives to the work in his
leisure hours. This man had neither game nor game-bag, nor any of the
accoutrements which denote either departure for a hunt or the ret