HONORÉ DE BALZAC Little French Masterpieces By HONORÉ DE BALZAC Edited by Alexander Jessup An Introduction by Ferdinand Brunetière The Translation by George Burnham Ives G. P. Putnam's Sons New York and London The Knickerbocker Press 1903 Contents HONORÉ DE BALZAC THE UNKNOWN MASTERPIECE A SEASHORE DRAMA AN EPISODE UNDER THE TERROR LA GRANDE BRETÈCHE THE CONSCRIPT A PASSION IN THE DESERT INTRODUCTION HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850) Balzac's short stories, which we call in French _nouvelles_, are, generally speaking, not the best-known or the most popular part of his work; nor are they the part best fitted to give a true and complete idea of his genius. But some of them are none the less masterpieces in their kind; they have characteristics and a significance not always possessed by their author's long novels, such as _Eugénie Grandet_ or _Cousin Pons;_ and finally, for this very reason, they hold in the unfinished structure of _The Human Comedy_ a place which it will be interesting to try to determine. That is all that will be attempted in this Introduction. Some of the stories contained in the present volume were written under curious circumstances. In the first place it is to be noted that they all date from 1830, 1831, and 1832[1] and therefore precede the conception and planning of _The Human Comedy_. Their value is far from being diminished by that fact. _An Episode under the Terror_ (1830), for instance, was composed as an introduction to the _Memoirs_ of Sanson--that executioner who of all executioners in the world's history probably despatched the fewest criminals and yet shed the most blood; and the _Memoirs_ themselves, which are entirely apocryphal, are also in part Balzac's own work. But, though composed in this way, to order and as a piece of hack work, _An Episode under the Terror_ is in its artistic brevity one of Balzac's most tragic and most finished narratives. _La Grande Bretèche_ (1832) was at first only an episode inserted among the more extended narratives of which it made part, as in the old-fashioned novel of tales within tales of which _Gil Blas_ is the type; and brief as it is, Balzac nevertheless rewrote it three or four times. It is therefore anything but an improvisation. Yet no other of these short stories can give more vividly than _La Grande Bretèche_ the impression of a work sprung at once in full completeness from its author's brain, and conceived from the very first in its indivisible unity. But, precisely, it is one of the characteristic traits of Balzac's genius that we hardly need to know when or for what purpose he wrote this or that one of his novels or stories. He bore them all within him at once--we might say that the germ of them was preëxistent in him before he had any conscious thought of objectivising them. His characters were born in him, as though from all eternity, before he knew them himself; and before he himself