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    The Message
    The Message
    The Message
    Ebook38 pages29 minutes

    The Message

    By Ellen Marriage and Honore de Balzac

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJul 1, 2000
    The Message

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      Book preview

      The Message - Ellen Marriage

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

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Message

      Author: Honore de Balzac

      Translator: Ellen Marriage

      Release Date: February, 1998 [Etext #1189]

      Posting Date: February 20, 2010

      Language: English

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

      Produced by Dagny

      THE MESSAGE

      By Honore De Balzac

      Translated by Ellen Marriage

      To M. le Marquis Damaso Pareto

      THE MESSAGE

      I have always longed to tell a simple and true story, which should strike terror into two young lovers, and drive them to take refuge each in the other's heart, as two children cling together at the sight of a snake by a woodside. At the risk of spoiling my story and of being taken for a coxcomb, I state my intention at the outset.

      I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if it fails to interest you, the failure will be in part my own fault, in part owing to historical veracity. Plenty of things in real life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select from realities those which contain possibilities of poetry.

      In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my finances obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you know, regard those airy perches on the top of the coach as the best seats; and for the first few miles I discovered abundance of excellent reasons for justifying the opinion of our neighbors. A young fellow, apparently in somewhat better circumstances, who came to take the seat beside me from preference, listened to my reasoning with inoffensive smiles. An approximate nearness of age, a similarity in ways of thinking, a common love of fresh air, and of the rich landscape scenery through which the coach was lumbering along,—these things, together with an indescribable magnetic something, drew us before long into one of those short-lived traveller's intimacies, in which we unbend with the more complacency because the intercourse is by its very nature transient, and makes no implicit demands upon the future.

      We had not come thirty leagues before we were talking of women and love. Then, with all the circumspection demanded in such

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