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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: others, so curiously energetic, and so interesting in spite of its
crimes.
An author ought to be above converting his tale, when the tale is
true, into a species of surprise-game, and of taking his readers, as
certain novellists do, through many volumes and from cellar to cellar,
to show them the dry bones of a dead body, and tell them, by way of
conclusion, that THAT is what has frightened them behind doors, hidden
in the arras, or in cellars where the dead man was buried and
forgotten. In spite of his aversion for prefaces, the author feels
bound to place the following statement at the head of this narrative.
Ferragus is a first episode which clings by invisible links to the
Ferragus |
