And, to the honor of the Thirteen, such
episodes as these are not wanting. Some day perhaps it may be thought
worth while to give their whole history to the world; in which case it
might form a pendant to the history of the buccaneers--that race apart
so curiously energetic, so attractive in spite of their crimes.
When a writer has a true story to tell, he should scorn to turn it
into a sort of puzzle toy, after the manner of those novelists who
take their reader for a walk through one cavern after another to show
him a dried-up corpse at the end of the fourth volume, and inform him,
by way of conclusion, that he has been frightened all along by a door
hidden somewhere or other behind some tapestry; or a dead body, left
by inadvertence, under the floor. So the present chronicler, in spite
of his objection to prefaces, felt bound to introduce his fragment by
a few remarks.
_Ferragus_, the first episode, is connected by invisible links with
the history of the Thirteen, for the power which they acquired in a
natural manner provides the apparently supernatural machinery.
Again, although a certain literary coquetry may be permissible to
retailers of the marvelous, the sober chronicler is bound to forego
such advantage as he may reap from an odd-sounding name, on which many
ephemeral successes are founded in these days. Wherefore the present
writer gives the following succinct statement of the reasons which
induced him to adopt the unlikely sounding title and sub-title.
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