文档介绍：THE RED INN
THE RED INN
BY HONORE DE BALZAC
Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley
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THE RED INN
DEDICATION
To Monsieur le Marquis de Custine.
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THE RED INN
THE RED INN
In I know not what year a Parisian banker, who had very extensive
commercial relations with Germany, was entertaining at dinner one of
those friends whom men of business often make in the markets of the
world through correspondence; a man hitherto personally unknown to him.
This friend, the head of a rather important house in Nuremburg, was a
stout worthy German, a man of taste and erudition, above all a man of
pipes, having a fine, broad, Nuremburgian face, with a square open
forehead adorned by a few sparse locks of yellowish hair. He was the type
of the sons of that pure and noble Germany, so fertile in honorable natures,
whose peaceful manners and morals have never been lost, even after seven
invasions.
This stranger laughed with simplicity, listened attentively, and drank
remarkably well, seeming to like champagne as much perhaps as he liked
his straw-colored Johannisburger. His name was Hermann, which is that of
most Germans whom authors bring upon their scene. Like a man who does
nothing frivolously, he was sitting squarely at the banker's table and eating
with that Teutonic appetite so celebrated throughout Europe, saying, in
fact, a conscientious farewell to the cookery of the great Careme.
To do honor to his guest the master of the house had invited a few
intimate friends, capitalists or merchants, and several agreeable and pretty
women, whose pleasant chatter and frank manners were in harmony with
German cordiality. Really, if you could have seen, as I saw, this joyous
gathering of persons who had drawn in mercial claws, and were
speculating only on the pleasures of life, you would have found no cause
to hate usurious discounts, or to curse bankruptcies. Mankind can't always
be doing evil. Even in the society of pirates one might find a few sw