Preface
_ SONS OF THE SOIL
BY HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Monsieur P. S. B. Gavault.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his Nouvelle Heloise: "I have seen the morals of my time and I publish these letters." May I not say to you, in imitation of that great writer, "I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this work"?
The object of this particular study--startling in its truth so long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of regarding it as an accident--is to bring to sight the leading characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have risen, and cried by every pen, "Arise, working-men!" just as former

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