HE DEPARTMENT

Translated by James Waring

DEDICATION

To Monsieur le Comte Ferdinand de Gramont.

MY DEAR FERDINAND,--If the chances of the world of literature--
_habent sua fata libelli_--should allow these lines to be an
enduring record, that will still be but a trifle in return for the
trouble you have taken--you, the Hozier, the Cherin, the King-at-
Arms of these Studies of Life; you, to whom the Navarreins,
Cadignans, Langeais, Blamont-Chauvrys, Chaulieus, Arthez,
Esgrignons, Mortsaufs, Valois--the hundred great names that form
the Aristocracy of the "Human Comedy" owe their lordly mottoes and
ingenious armorial bearings. Indeed, "the Armorial of the Etudes,
devised by Ferdinand de Gramont, gentleman," is a complete manual
of French Heraldry, in which nothing is forgotten, not even the
arms of the Empire, and I shall preserve it as a monument of
friendship and of Benedictine patience. What profound knowledge of
the old feudal spirit is to be seen in the motto of the
Beauseants, _Pulchre sedens, melius agens_; in that of the
Espards, _Des partem leonis_; in that of the Vandenesses, _Ne se
vend_. And what elegance in the thousand details of the learned
symbolism which will always show how far accuracy has been carried
in my work, to which you, the poet, have contributed.

Your old friend,
DE BALZAC.

On the skirts of Le Berry stands a town which, watered by the Loire,
infallibly attracts the traveler's eye. Sancerre crowns the topmost
height of a chain of hills, the last of the range that gives variety to
the Nivernais. The Loire floods the flats at the foot of these slopes,
leaving a yellow alluvium that is extremely fertile, excepting in those
places where it has deluged them with sand and destroyed them forever,
by one of those terrible risings which are also incidental to the
Vistula--the Loire of the northern coast.

The hill on which the houses of Sancerre are grouped is so far from the
river that the little river-port of Saint-Thibault thrives on the life
of Sancerre. There wine is shipped and oak staves are landed, with all
the produce brought from the upper and lower Loire. At the period when
this story begins the suspension bridges at Cosne and at Saint-Thibault
were already built. Travelers from Paris to Sancerre by the
southern road were no longer ferried across the river from Cosne to
Saint-Thibault; and this of itself is enough to show that