The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Alkahest, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Alkahest

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: September, 1998 [Etext #1453]
Posting Date: February 25, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALKAHEST ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

THE ALKAHEST

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION

To Madame Josephine Delannoy nee Doumerc.

Madame, may God grant that this, my book, may live longer than I,
for then the gratitude which I owe to you, and which I hope will
equal your almost maternal kindness to me, would last beyond the
limits prescribed for human affection. This sublime privilege of
prolonging life in our hearts for a time by the life of the work
we leave behind us would be (if we could only be sure of gaining
it at last) a reward indeed for all the labor undertaken by those
who aspire to such an immortality.

Yet again I say--May God grant it!

DE BALZAC.

THE ALKAHEST

(THE HOUSE OF CLAES)

CHAPTER I

There is a house at Douai in the rue de Paris, whose aspect, interior
arrangements, and details have preserved, to a greater degree than those
of other domiciles, the characteristics of the old Flemish buildings, so
naively adapted to the patriarchal manners and customs of that excellent
land. Before describing this house it may be well, in the interest
of other writers, to explain the necessity for such didactic
preliminaries,--since they have roused a protest from certain ignorant
and voracious readers who want emotions without undergoing the
generating process, the flower without the seed, the child without
gestation. Is Art supposed to have higher powers than Nature?

The events of human existence, whether public or private, are so closely
allied to architecture that the majority of observers can reconstruct
nations and individuals, in their habits and ways of life, from the
remains of public monuments or the relics of a home. Archaeology is to
social nature what comparative anatomy is to organized na