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To Monsieur P.S. B. Gavault.

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

formerly they cried, “Arise!” to the “tiers etat.” None of these

Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and

study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against

those others who fancy themselves strong—that of the peasant

against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the

legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the

present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers

blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who

renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land

to be a thing that is, and that is not.

You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which

undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides

an acre into a hundred fragments—ever spurred on to his banquet

by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary

and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the

Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the

middle classes have destroyed the nobility. Lifted above the law

by its own insignificance, this Robespierre, with one head and

twenty million arms, is at work perpetually; crouching in country

districts, intrenched in municipal councils, under arms in the

national guard of every canton in France—one result of the year

1830, which failed to remember that Napoleon preferred the chances

of defeat to the danger of arming the masses.

If during the last eight years I have again and again given up the

writing of this book (the most important of those I have

undertaken to write), and as often returned to it, it was, as you

and other friends can well imagine, because my courage shrank from

the many difficulties, the many essential details of a drama so

doubly dreadful and so cruelly bloody. Among the reasons which

render me now almost, it may be thought, foolhardy, I count the

desire to finish a work long designed to be to you a proof of my

deep and lasting gratitude for a friendship that has ever been

among my greatest consolations in misfortune.

De Balzac.