The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Red Inn, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Red Inn

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: August, 1998 [Etext #1433]
Posting Date: February 25, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RED INN ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

THE RED INN

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To Monsieur le Marquis de Custine.

THE RED INN

In I know not what year a Parisian banker, who had very extensive
commercial relations with Germany, was entertaining at dinner one of
those friends whom men of business often make in the markets of the
world through correspondence; a man hitherto personally unknown to him.
This friend, the head of a rather important house in Nuremburg, was a
stout worthy German, a man of taste and erudition, above all a man
of pipes, having a fine, broad, Nuremburgian face, with a square open
forehead adorned by a few sparse locks of yellowish hair. He was the
type of the sons of that pure and noble Germany, so fertile in honorable
natures, whose peaceful manners and morals have never been lost, even
after seven invasions.

This stranger laughed with simplicity, listened attentively, and drank
remarkably well, seeming to like champagne as much perhaps as he liked
his straw-colored Johannisburger. His name was Hermann, which is that
of most Germans whom authors bring upon their scene. Like a man who does
nothing frivolously, he was sitting squarely at the banker's table and
eating with that Teutonic appetite so celebrated throughout Europe,
saying, in fact, a conscientious farewell to the cookery of the great
Careme.

To do honor to his guest the master of the house had invited a few
intimate friends, capitalists or merchants, and several agreeable and
pretty women, whose pleasant chatter and frank manners were in harmony
with German cordiality. Really, if you could have seen, as I saw, this
joyous gathering of persons who had drawn in their commercial claws, and
were speculating onl