We must ask pardon of the public for offering it this book, and give it
due warning of what it will find therein.
The public loves fictitious novels! this is a true novel.
It loves books which make a pretence of introducing their readers to
fashionable society: this book deals with the life of the street.
It loves little indecent books, memoirs of courtesans, alcove
confessions, erotic obscenity, the scandal tucked away in pictures in a
bookseller's shop window: that which is contained in the following pages
is rigidly clean and pure. Do not expect the photograph of Pleasure
_decolletee_: the following study is the clinic of Love.
Again, the public loves to read pleasant, soothing stories, adventures
that end happily, imaginative works that disturb neither its digestion
nor its peace of mind: this book furnishes entertainment of a
melancholy, violent sort calculated to disarrange the habits and injure
the health of the public.
Why then have we written it? For no other purpose than to annoy the
public and offend its tastes?
By no means.
Living as we do in the nineteenth century, in an age of universal
suffrage, of democracy, of liberalism, we asked ourselves the question
whether what are called "the lower classes" had no rights in the novel;
if that world beneath a world, the common people, must needs remain
subject to the literary interdict, and helpless against the contempt of
authors who have hitherto said no word to imply that the common people
possess a heart and soul. We asked ourselves whether, in these days of
equality in which we live, there are classes unworthy the notice of the
author and the reader, misfortunes too lowly, dramas too foul-mouthed,
catastrophes too commonplace in the terror they inspire. We were curious
to know if that conventional symbol of a forgotten literature, of a
vanished society, Tragedy, is definitely dead; if, in a country where
castes no longer exist and aristocracy has no legal status, the miseries
of the lowly and the poor would appeal to public interest, emotion,
compassion, as forcibly as the miseries of the great and the rich; if,
in a word, the tears that are shed in low life have the same power to
cause tears to flow as the tears shed in high life.
These thoughts led us to venture upon the humble tale, _Soeur
Philomene_, in 1861; they lead us to put forth _Germinie Lacerteux_
to-day.
Now, let the book be spoken slightingly of; it matters little. At this
day, when the sphere of the Novel is broadening and expanding, when it
is beginning to be the serious, impassioned, living form of literary
study and social investigation, when it is becoming, by virtue of
analysis and psychological research, the true History of contemporary
morals, when the novel has taken its place among the necessary elements
of knowledge, it may properly demand its liberty and freedom of speech.
And to encourage it in the search for Art and Truth, to authorize it to
disclose misery and suffering which it is not well for the fortunate
people of Paris to forget, and to show to people of fashion what the
Sisters of Charity have the courage to see for themselves, what the
queens of old compelled their children to touch with their eyes in the
hospitals: the visible, palpitating human suffering that teaches
charity; to confirm the novel in the practice of that religion which the
last century called by the vast and far-reaching name, _Humanity_:--it
needs no other warrant than the consciousness that that is its right.
_Paris, October, 1864._