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

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Title: The Thirteen

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley and Ellen Marriage

Release Date: Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7416]
Posting Date: March 7, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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

Produced by John Bickers, Bonnie Sala, and Dagny

THE THIRTEEN

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley and Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION

To Hector Berlioz.

INTRODUCTION

The _Histoire des Treize_ consists--or rather is built up--of three
stories: _Ferragus_ or the _Rue Soly_, _La Duchesse de Langeais_ or _Ne
touchez-paz a la hache_, and _La Fille aux Yeux d'Or_.

To tell the truth, there is more power than taste throughout the
_Histoire des Treize_, and perhaps not very much less unreality than
power. Balzac is very much better than Eugene Sue, though Eugene Sue
also is better than it is the fashion to think him just now. But he is
here, to a certain extent competing with Sue on the latter's own ground.
The notion of the "Devorants"--of a secret society of men devoted to
each other's interests, entirely free from any moral or legal scruple,
possessed of considerable means in wealth, ability, and position, all
working together, by fair means or foul, for good ends or bad--is,
no doubt, rather seducing to the imagination at all times; and it so
happened that it was particularly seducing to the imagination of
that time. And its example has been powerful since; it gave us Mr.
Stevenson's _New Arabian Nights_ only, as it were, the other day.

But there is something a little schoolboyish in it; and I do not know
that Balzac has succeeded entirely in eliminating this something. The
pathos of the death, under persecution, of the innocent Clemence does
not entirely make up for the unreasonableness of the whole situation.
Nobody can say that the abominable misconduct of Maulincour--who is a
hopeless "cad"--is too much punished, though an Englishman may think
that Dr. Johnson's receipt of three or four footmen with cudgels,
applied r