PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR.
Thematerial for the French life in this book I owe entirely to a friend, without whose knowledge and assistance it would not have been written, but whose name I am not at liberty to disclose.
The faults of the work are my own, but the merit, if there is any merit, is his; if there is not, the misfortune is his as well as the public’s, since an abler hand should have made something of the material he placed at my disposal.
The actual characters are not, as children say of fairy tales, “true”; but many of them belong to that system of parallel cases which runs side by side with the truth.