Project Gutenberg's The Collection of Antiquities, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Collection of Antiquities

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage

Release Date: August, 1998 [Etext #1405]
Posting Date: February 24, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION

To Baron Von Hammer-Purgstall, Member of the Aulic Council, Author
of the History of the Ottoman Empire.

Dear Baron,--You have taken so warm an interest in my long, vast
"History of French Manners in the Nineteenth Century," you have
given me so much encouragement to persevere with my work, that you
have given me a right to associate your name with some portion of
it. Are you not one of the most important representatives of
conscientious, studious Germany? Will not your approval win for me
the approval of others, and protect this attempt of mine? So proud
am I to have gained your good opinion, that I have striven to
deserve it by continuing my labors with the unflagging courage
characteristic of your methods of study, and of that exhaustive
research among documents without which you could never have given
your monumental work to the world of letters. Your sympathy with
such labor as you yourself have bestowed upon the most brilliant
civilization of the East, has often sustained my ardor through
nights of toil given to the details of our modern civilization.
And will not you, whose naive kindliness can only be compared with
that of our own La Fontaine, be glad to know of this?

May this token of my respect for you and your work find you at
Dobling, dear Baron, and put you and yours in mind of one of your
most sincere admirers and friends.

DE BALZAC.

THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES

There stands a house at a corner of a street, in the middle of a town,
in one of the least important prefectures in France, but the name of the
street and the name of the town must be suppressed here