y
of sketches of the kind of personage whose part, in his day and since,
every young Frenchman has aspired to play, and some have played. It
cannot be said that "a moral man is Marsay"; it cannot be said that he
has the element of good-nature which redeems Rastignac. But he bears
a blame and a burden for which we Britons are responsible in part--the
Byronic ideal of the guilty hero coming to cross and blacken the old
French model of unscrupulous good humor. It is not a very pretty mixture
or a very worthy ideal; but I am not so sure that it is not still a
pretty common one.

The association of the three stories forming the _Histoire des Treize_
is, in book form, original, inasmuch as they filled three out of the
four volumes of _Etudes des Moeurs_ published in 1834-35, and themselves
forming part of the first collection of _Scenes de la Vie Parisienne_.
But _Ferragus_ had appeared in parts (with titles to each) in the
_Revue de Paris_ for March and April 1833, and part of _La Duchesse de
Langeais_ in the _Echo de la Jeune France_ almost contemporaneously.
There are divisions in this also. _Ferragus_ and _La Duchesse_ also
appeared without _La Fille aux Yeux d'Or_ in 1839, published in one
volume by Charpentier, before their absorption at the usual time in the
_Comedie_.

George Saintsbury

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

In the Paris of the Empire there were found Thirteen men equally
impressed with the same idea, equally endowed with energy enough to keep
them true to it, while among themselves they were loyal enough to keep
faith even when their interests seemed to clash. They were strong
enough to set themselves above all laws; bold enough to shrink from no
enterprise; and lucky enough to succeed in nearly everything that they
undertook. So profoundly politic were they, that they could dissemble
the tie which bound them together. They ran the greatest risks, and
kept their failures to themselves. Fear never entered into their
calculations; not one of them had trembled before princes, before the
executioner's axe, before innocence. They had taken each other as they
were, regardless of social prejudices. Criminals they doubtless were,
yet none the less were they all remarkable for some one of the virtues
which go to the making of great men, and their numbers were filled up
only from among picked recruits. Finally, that nothing should be lacking
to complete the dark, mysterious romance of their history, nobody to
this day