A Street of Paris and Its Inhabitant

This eBook was prepared from an edition published by Meyer Brothers and Company, New York, 1900.
Of this edition 400 copies were printed. 25 copies on Japan Paper, numbered 1 to 25. 375 copies on specially made paper, numbered 26 to 400.
This little Parisian silhouette in prose was written by Balzac to be the first chapter of a new series of the Comedie Humaine that he was preparing while the first was finishing. Balzac was never tired. He said that the men who were tired were those who rested and tried to work afterwards.
A Street of Paris and its Inhabitant was in its author's mind when Hetzel, engaged in collecting a copy for the work entitled Le Diable a Paris that all book lovers admire, asked Balzac for an unpublished manuscript.
Balzac gave him this, after retouching it, in order that it should have the air of a finished story. Why Hetzel did not use it in Le Diable a Paris, no one knows. He went into exile, in Brussels, at the military revolution that made Napoleon III Emperor and, needing money, sold A Street of Paris and its Inhabitant with other manuscripts to Le Siecle.
Balzac's work was printed entire in three pages of the journal Le Siecle, in Paris, July 28, 1845. M. le Vicomte Spoelberch de Lovenjoul owns Balzac's autograph manuscript of it. These details are given by him and might be reproduced here with his signature. But the publishers wish not to be deprived of the pleasure of paying homage to the Vicomte Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.
He has made in the biography of Balzac, in editions of his books, in the pious collection of his unpublished writings, the ideal literary man's monument.
H. P. du B.

Paris has curved streets, streets that are serpentine. It counts, perhaps, only the Rue Boudreau in the Chaussee d'Antin and the Rue Duguay-Trouin near the Luxembourg as streets shaped exactly like a T-square. The Rue Duguay-Trouin extends one of its two arms to the Rue d'Assas and the other to the Rue de Fleurus.