From "The Country Doctor,"
by Honore de Balzac. Translated
by Katharine Prescott
Wormeley.

INTRODUCTION

When the traveller looks at Rome for the first time he does not realize
that there have been several cities on the same piece of ground, and
that the churches and palaces and other great buildings he sees to-day
rest on an earlier and invisible city buried in dust beneath the
foundations of the Rome of the Twentieth Century. In like manner, and
because all visible things on the surface of the earth have grown out of
older things which have ceased to be, the world of habits, the ideas,
customs, fancies, and arts, in which we live is a survival of a younger
world which long ago disappeared. When we speak of Friday as an unlucky
day, or touch wood after saying that we have had good luck for a long
time, or take the trouble to look at the new moon over the right
shoulder, or avoid crossing the street while a funeral is passing, we
are recalling old superstitions or beliefs, a vanished world in which
our remote forefathers lived.

We do not realize how much of this vanished world still survives in our
language, our talk, our books, our sculpture and pictures. The plays of
Shakespeare are full of reference to the fancies and beliefs of the
English people in his time or in the times not long before him. If we
could understand all these references as we read, we should find
ourselves in a world as different from the England of to-day as England
is from Austria, and among a people whose ideas and language we should
find it hard to understand.

In those early days there were no magazines or newspapers, and for the
people as contrasted with the scholars there were no books. The most
learned men were ignorant of things which intelligent children know
to-day; only a very few men and women could read or write; and all kinds
of beliefs about animals, birds, witches, fairies, giants, and the
magical qualities of herbs and stones flourished like weeds in a
neglected garden. There came into existence an immense mass of
misinformation about all manner of things; some of it very stupid, much
of it very poetic and interesting. Below the region of exact knowledge
accessible to men of education, lay a region of popular fancies, ideas,
proverbs, and superstitions in which the great mass of men and women
lived, and which was a kind of invisible playground for children. Much
of the popular belie