Excerpt from The Thirteen (Histoire Des Treize): And Other Stories La Duchesse de Langeais is, I think, a better story, with more romantic attraction, free from the objections just made to Ferragus, and furnished with a powerful, if slightly the atrical catastrophe. It is as good as anything that its author has done of the kind, subject to those general considerations of probability and otherwise which have been already hinted at. For those who are not troubled by any such critical reflections, both, no doubt, will be highly satisfactory. And, indeed, I must confess that I should not think much of any boy who, beginning Balzac with the Histoire des Treize, failed to go rather mad over it. I know there was a time when Iused to like it best of all, and thought not merely Eugenie Grandet but Le Pere Goriot (though not the Peau de Chagrin dull in comparison. Some attention, however, must be paid to two remarkable characters, on whom it is quite clear that Balzac expended a great deal of pains, and one of whom he seems to have caressed, as the French say, with a curious admixture of dislike and admiration. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.