The Project Gutenberg EBook of La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages, by
Jules Michelet

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Title: La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages

Author: Jules Michelet

Translator: Lionel James Trotter

Release Date: February 27, 2010 [EBook #31420]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LA SORCIERE.

J. MICHELET.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY WOODFALL AND KINDER,
ANGEL COURT, SKINNER STREET.

THE WITCH OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

FROM THE FRENCH OF J. MICHELET.

BY L. J. TROTTER.

(_The only Authorized English Translation._)

LONDON:
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.,
STATIONERS' HALL COURT.
MDCCCLXIII.

PREFACE.

In this translation of a work rich in the raciest beauties and defects
of an author long since made known to the British public, the present
writer has striven to recast the trenchant humour, the scornful
eloquence, the epigrammatic dash of Mr. Michelet, in language not all
unworthy of such a word-master. How far he has succeeded others may be
left to judge. In one point only is he aware of having been less true
to his original than in theory he was bound to be. He has slurred or
slightly altered a few of those passages which French readers take as
a thing of course, but English ones, because of their different
training, are supposed to eschew. A Frenchman, in short, writes for
men, an Englishman rather for drawing-room ladies, who tolerate
grossness only in the theatres and the columns of the newspapers. Mr.
Michelet's subject, and his late researches, lead him into details,
moral and physical, which among ourselves are seldom mixed up with
themes of general talk. The coarsest of these have been pruned away,
but enough perhaps remain to startle readers of especial prudery. The
translator, however, felt that he had no choice between shocking
these and sinning against his original. Readers of a larger culture
will make allowance for such a strait, will not be s