Ferragus | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] Dagny,
[email protected] and Bonnie Sala

FERRAGUS, CHIEF OF THE DEVORANTS
by HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Hector Berlioz.

PREFACE
Thirteen men were banded together in Paris under the Empire, all
imbued with one and the same sentiment, all gifted with sufficient

energy to be faithful to the same thought, with sufficient honor among
themselves never to betray one another even if their interests clashed;
and sufficiently wily and politic to conceal the sacred ties that united
them, sufficiently strong to maintain themselves above the law, bold
enough to undertake all things, and fortunate enough to succeed, nearly
always, in their undertakings; having run the greatest dangers, but
keeping silence if defeated; inaccessible to fear; trembling neither
before princes, nor executioners, not even before innocence; accepting
each other for such as they were, without social prejudices,--criminals,
no doubt, but certainly remarkable through certain of the qualities that
make great men, and recruiting their number only among men of mark.
That nothing might be lacking to the sombre and mysterious poesy of
their history, these Thirteen men have remained to this day unknown;
though all have realized the most chimerical ideas that the fantastic
power falsely attributed to the Manfreds, the Fausts, and the Melmoths
can suggest to the imagination. To-day, they are broken up, or, at least,
dispersed; they have peaceably put their necks once more under the
yoke of civil law, just as Morgan, that Achilles among pirates,
transformed himself from a buccaneering scourge to a quiet colonist,
and spent, without remorse, around his domestic hearth the millions
gathered in blood by the lurid light of flames and slaughter.
Since the death of Napoleon, circumstances, about which the author
must keep silence, have still farther dissolved the original bond of this
secret society, always extraordinary, sometimes sinister, as though it
lived in the blackest pages of Mrs. Radcliffe. A somewhat strange
permission to relate in his own way a few of the adventures of these
men (while respecting certain susceptibilities) has only recently been
given to him by one of those anonymous heroes to whom all society
was once occultly subjected. In this permission the writer fancied he
detected a vague desire for personal celebrity.
This man, apparently still young, with fair hair and blue eyes, whose
sweet, clear voice seemed to denote a feminine soul, was pale of face
and mysterious in manner; he conversed affably, declared himself not
more than forty years of age, and apparently belonged to the very
highest social classes. The name which he assumed must have been
fictitious; his person was unknown in society. Who was he? That, no
one has ever known.

Perhaps, in confiding to the author the extraordinary matters which he
related to him, this mysterious person may have wished to see them in a
manner reproduced, and thus enjoy the emotions they were certain to
bring to the hearts of the masses,--a feeling analogous to that of
Macpherson when the name of his creation Ossian was transcribed into
all languages. That was certainly, for the Scotch lawyer, one of the
keenest, or at any rate the rarest, sensations a man could give himself.
Is it not the incognito of genius? To write the "Itinerary from Paris to
Jerusalem" is to take a share in the human glory of a single epoch; but
to endow his native land with another Homer, was not that usurping the
work of God?
The author knows too well the laws of narration to be ignorant of the
pledges this short preface is contracting for him; but he also knows
enough of the history of the THIRTEEN to be certain that his present
tale will never be thought below the interest inspired by this
programme. Dramas steeped in blood, comedies filled with terror,
romantic tales through which rolled heads mysteriously decapitated,
have been confided to him. If readers were not surfeited with horrors
served up to them