The Thirteen | Page 3

loyal enough
to keep faith even when their interests seemed to clash. They were
strong enough to set themselves above all laws; bold enough to shrink
from no enterprise; and lucky enough to succeed in nearly everything
that they undertook. So profoundly politic were they, that they could

dissemble the tie which bound them together. They ran the greatest
risks, and kept their failures to themselves. Fear never entered into their
calculations; not one of them had trembled before princes, before the
executioner's axe, before innocence. They had taken each other as they
were, regardless of social prejudices. Criminals they doubtless were,
yet none the less were they all remarkable for some one of the virtues
which go to the making of great men, and their numbers were filled up
only from among picked recruits. Finally, that nothing should be
lacking to complete the dark, mysterious romance of their history,
nobody to this day knows who they were. The Thirteen once realized
all the wildest ideas conjured up by tales of the occult powers of a
Manfred, a Faust, or a Melmoth; and to-day the band is broken up or, at
any rate, dispersed. Its members have quietly returned beneath the yoke
of the Civil Code; much as Morgan, the Achilles of piracy, gave up
buccaneering to be a peaceable planter; and, untroubled by qualms of
conscience, sat himself down by the fireside to dispose of blood-
stained booty acquired by the red light of blazing towns.
After Napoleon's death, the band was dissolved by a chance event
which the author is bound for the present to pass over in silence, and its
mysterious existence, as curious, it may be, as the darkest novel by Mrs.
Radcliffe, came to an end.
It was only lately that the present writer, detecting, as he fancied, a
faint desire for celebrity in one of the anonymous heroes to whom the
whole band once owed an occult allegiance, received the somewhat
singular permission to make public certain of the adventures which
befell that band, provided that, while telling the story in his own
fashion, he observed certain limits.
The aforesaid leader was still an apparently young man with fair hair
and blue eyes, and a soft, thin voice which might seem to indicate a
feminine temperament. His face was pale, his ways mysterious. He
chatted pleasantly, and told me that he was only just turned of forty. He
might have belonged to any one of the upper classes. The name which
he gave was probably assumed, and no one answering to his description
was known in society. Who is he, do you ask? No one knows.
Perhaps when he made his extraordinary disclosures to the present
writer, he wished to see them in some sort reproduced; to enjoy the
effect of the sensation on the multitude; to feel as Macpherson might

have felt when the name of Ossian, his creation, passed into all
languages. And, in truth, that Scottish advocate knew one of the
keenest, or, at any rate, one of the rarest sensations in human
experience. What was this but the incognito of genius? To write an
/Itineraire de Paris a Jerusalem/ is to take one's share in the glory of a
century, but to give a Homer to one's country--this surely is a
usurpation of the rights of God.
The writer is too well acquainted with the laws of narration to be
unaware of the nature of the pledge given by this brief preface; but, at
the same time, he knows enough of the history of the Thirteen to feel
confident that he shall not disappoint any expectations raised by the
programme. Tragedies dripping with gore, comedies piled up with
horrors, tales of heads taken off in secret have been confided to him. If
any reader has not had enough of the ghastly tales served up to the
public for some time past, he has only to express his wish; the author is
in a position to reveal cold-blooded atrocities and family secrets of a
gloomy and astonishing nature. But in preference he has chosen those
pleasanter stories in which stormy passions are succeeded by purer
scenes, where the beauty and goodness of woman shine out the brighter
for the darkness. And, to the honor of the Thirteen, such episodes as
these are not wanting. Some day perhaps it may be thought worth while
to give their whole history to the world; in which case it might form a
pendant to the history of the buccaneers--that race apart so curiously
energetic, so attractive in spite of their crimes.
When a writer has a true story to tell, he should scorn to turn it into a
sort of puzzle toy, after the manner of those novelists who take their
reader for a walk through one