Germinie Lacerteux

Jupillon was a true Parisian: he loved to fish with a pole and line. And when summer came they stayed there all day, at the foot of the garden, on the bank of the stream—Jupillon on a laundry board resting on two stakes, pole in hand, and Germinie sitting, with the child in her skirts, under the medlar tree that overhung the stream.
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 décolletée : 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.