The Red Inn

The Red Inn, by Honore de
Balzac

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Title: The Red Inn
Author: Honore de Balzac
Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley
Release Date: July 14, 2005 [EBook #1433]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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INN ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

THE RED INN
BY

HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Monsieur le Marquis de Custine.

THE RED INN

In I know not what year a Parisian banker, who had very extensive
commercial relations with Germany, was entertaining at dinner one of
those friends whom men of business often make in the markets of the
world through correspondence; a man hitherto personally unknown to
him. This friend, the head of a rather important house in Nuremburg,
was a stout worthy German, a man of taste and erudition, above all a
man of pipes, having a fine, broad, Nuremburgian face, with a square
open forehead adorned by a few sparse locks of yellowish hair. He was
the type of the sons of that pure and noble Germany, so fertile in
honorable natures, whose peaceful manners and morals have never
been lost, even after seven invasions.
This stranger laughed with simplicity, listened attentively, and drank
remarkably well, seeming to like champagne as much perhaps as he
liked his straw-colored Johannisburger. His name was Hermann, which
is that of most Germans whom authors bring upon their scene. Like a
man who does nothing frivolously, he was sitting squarely at the
banker's table and eating with that Teutonic appetite so celebrated
throughout Europe, saying, in fact, a conscientious farewell to the
cookery of the great Careme.

To do honor to his guest the master of the house had invited a few
intimate friends, capitalists or merchants, and several agreeable and
pretty women, whose pleasant chatter and frank manners were in
harmony with German cordiality. Really, if you could have seen, as I
saw, this joyous gathering of persons who had drawn in their
commercial claws, and were speculating only on the pleasures of life,
you would have found no cause to hate usurious discounts, or to curse
bankruptcies. Mankind can't always be doing evil. Even in the society
of pirates one might find a few sweet hours during which we could
fancy their sinister craft a pleasure-boat rocking on the deep.
"Before we part, Monsieur Hermann will, I trust, tell one more German
story to terrify us?"
These words were said at dessert by a pale fair girl, who had read, no
doubt, the tales of Hoffmann and the novels of Walter Scott. She was
the only daughter of the banker, a charming young creature whose
education was then being finished at the Gymnase, the plays of which
she adored. At this moment the guests were in that happy state of
laziness and silence which follows a delicious dinner, especially if we
have presumed too far on our digestive powers. Leaning back in their
chairs, their wrists lightly resting on the edge of the table, they were
indolently playing with the gilded blades of their dessert-knives. When
a dinner comes to this declining moment some guests will be seen to
play with a pear seed; others roll crumbs of bread between their fingers
and thumbs; lovers trace indistinct letters with fragments of fruit;
misers count the stones on their plate and arrange them as a manager
marshals his supernumeraries at the back of the stage. These are little
gastronomic felicities which Brillat-Savarin, otherwise so complete an
author, overlooked in his book. The footmen had disappeared. The
dessert was like a squadron after a battle: all the dishes were disabled,
pillaged, damaged; several were wandering around the table, in spite of
the efforts of the mistress of the house to keep them in their places.
Some of the persons present were gazing at pictures of Swiss scenery,
symmetrically hung upon the gray-toned walls of the dining-room. Not
a single guest was bored; in fact, I never yet knew a man who was sad
during his digestion of a good dinner. We like at such moments to

remain in quietude, a species of middle ground between the reverie of a
thinker and the comfort of the ruminating animals; a condition which
we may call the material melancholy of gastronomy.
So the guests now turned spontaneously to the excellent German,
delighted to have a tale to listen to, even though it might prove of no