The Collection of Antiquities

THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIESBy 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. Every one will appreciate the motives of this sage reticence demanded by convention; for if a writer takes upon himself the office of annalist of his own time he is bound to touch on many sore subjects. The house was called the Hotel dEsgrignon; but let dEsgrignon be considered a mere fancy name neither more nor less connected with real people than the conventional Belval Floricour or Derville of the stage or the Adalberts and Mombreuses of romance. After all the names of the principal characters will be quite as much disguised; for though in this history the chronicler would prefer to conceal the facts under a mass of contradictions anachronisms improbabilities and absurdities the truth will out in spite of him. You uproot a vine stock as you imagine and the stem will send up lusty shoots after you have ploughed your vineyard over.. The Hotel dEsgrignon was nothing more nor less than the house in which the old Marquis lived; or in the style of ancient documents Charles Marie Victor Ange Carol Marquis dEsgrignon. It was only an ordinary house but the townspeople and tradesmen had begun by calling it the Hotel dEsgrignon in jest and ended after a score of years by giving it that name in earnest.