An Episode under the Terror

By Honoré de Balzac

"An Episode under the Terror" by Honoré de Balzac (translated by Clara Bell). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 2, 2019
• ISBN: 4057664601551

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright. Regarded as one of the key figures of French and European literature, Balzac’s realist approach to writing would influence Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, and Karl Marx. With a precocious attitude and fierce intellect, Balzac struggled first in school and then in business before dedicating himself to the pursuit of writing as both an art and a profession. His distinctly industrious work routine—he spent hours each day writing furiously by hand and made extensive edits during the publication process—led to a prodigious output of dozens of novels, stories, plays, and novellas. La Comédie humaine, Balzac’s most famous work, is a sequence of 91 finished and 46 unfinished stories, novels, and essays with which he attempted to realistically and exhaustively portray every aspect of French society during the early-nineteenth century.

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Honoré de Balzac

An Episode under the Terror

Published by Good Press, 2019

[e-mail]

EAN 4057664601551

Table of Contents

Translated by Clara Bell and Others

AN EPISODE UNDER THE TERROR

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Translated by Clara Bell and Others

Table of Contents

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DEDICATION

To Monsieur Guyonnet-Merville.

Is it not a necessity to explain to a public curious to know

everything, how I came to be sufficiently learned in the law to

carry on the business of my little world? And in so doing, am I

not bound to put on record the memory of the amiable and

intelligent man who, meeting the Scribe (another clerk-amateur) at

a ball, said, "Just give the office a turn; there is work for you

there, I assure you." But do you need this public testimony to

feel assured of the affection of the writer?

DE BALZAC.

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AN EPISODE UNDER THE TERROR

Table of Contents

On the 22nd of January, 1793, towards eight o'clock in the evening, an old lady came down the steep street that comes to an end opposite the Church of Saint Laurent in the Faubourg Saint Martin. It had snowed so heavily all day long that the lady's footsteps were scarcely audible; the streets were deserted, and a feeling of dread, not unnatural amid the silence, was further increased by the whole extent of the Terror beneath which France was groaning in those days; what was more, the old lady so far had met no one by the way. Her sight had long been failing, so that the few foot passengers dispersed like shadows in the distance over the wide thoroughfare through the faubourg, were quite invisible to her by the light of the lanterns.

She had passed the end of the Rue des Morts, when she fancied that she could hear the