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Excerpt: Pierrette by Honore de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

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Excerpt: Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency by The Duke of Saint-Simon.

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Excerpt: No one but myself know what I have suffered, nor what my books have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity.

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Excerpt: Vanity Fair: Volume One (Chapters One through Twenty-five) by William Makepeace Thackeray.

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Chirp the First. The kettle began it! Don?t tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that she couldn?t say which of them began it; but, I say the kettle did. I ought to know, I hope! The kettle began it, full five minutes by the little waxy faced Dutch clock in the corner, before the Cricket uttered a chirp....

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Excerpt: I once used to live in a little street which probably is not known to you--the Rue de Lesdiguieres. It is a turning out of the Rue Saint-Antoine, beginning just opposite a fountain near the Place de la Bastille, and ending in the Rue de la Cerisaie. Love of knowledge stranded me in a garret; my nights I spent in work, my days in reading at the Bibliotheque d?Orleans, close by. I lived frugally; I had accepted the conditions of the monastic life, necessary conditions for every worker, scarcely permitting myself a walk along the Boulevard. Bourdon when the weather was fine....

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Excerpt: AEGEON. Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall And by the doom of death end woes and all. DUKE SOLINUS: Merchant of Syracuse, plead no more; I am not partial to infringe our laws: The enmity and discord which of late Sprung from the rancorous outrage of your duke To merchants, our well-dealing countrymen, Who wanting guilders to redeem their lives Have seal?d his rigorous statutes with their bloods, Excludes all pity from our threatening looks. For, since the mortal and intestine jars ?Twixt thy seditious countrymen and us....

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. Of the joy King Arthur and the queen had of the achievement of the Sangreal; and how Launcelot fell to his old love again. So after the quest of the Sangreal was fulfilled, and all knights that were left alive were come again unto the Table Round, as the book of the Sangreal maketh mention, then was there great joy in the court; and in especial King Arthur and Queen Guenever made great joy of the remnant that were come home, and passing glad was the king and the queen of Sir Launcelot and of Sir Bors, for they had been passing long away in the quest of the Sangreal....

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Excerpt: Modern Broods, or Developments Unlooked For by Charlotte M. Yonge.

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Excerpt: William Shakespeare?s Titus Andronicus.

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Excerpt: A Grateful People. On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively, so neat, and so trim that one might believe every day to be Sunday, with its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses, with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost Eastern cupolas are reflected, -- the city of the Hague, the capital of the Seven United Provinces, was swelling in all its arteries with a black and red stream of hurried, panting, and restless citizens, who, with their knives in their girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or sticks in their hands, were pushing on to the Buytenhof, a terrible prison, the grated windows of which are still shown, where, on the charge of attempted murder preferred against him by the surgeon Tyckelaer, Cornelius de Witt, the brother of the Grand Pensionary of Holland was confined....

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Excerpt: ?The Passionate Pilgrim? is a publication of the Pennsylvania State University. This Portable Document File is furnished free and without any charge of any kind. Any person using this document file, for any purpose, and any way does so at his or her own risk. Neither the Pennsyvlania State University nor Jim Manis, Faculty Editor, nor anyone associated with the Pennsylvania State University assumes any responsibility for the material contained within the document or for the file as an electronic transmission in any way....

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Excerpt: At the very outset of the writer?s literary career, a friend, long since dead, gave him the subject of this Study. Later on he found the same story in a collection published about the beginning of the present century. To the best of his belief, it is some stray fancy of the brain of Hoffmann of Berlin; probably it appeared in some German almanac, and was omitted in the published editions of his collected works. The Comedie Humaine is sufficiently rich in original creations for the author to own to this innocent piece of plagiarism; when, like the worthy La Fontaine, he has told unwittingly, and after his own fashion, a tale already related by another....

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Excerpt: The Pickwick Papers, Volume One by Charles Dickens.

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Excerpt: When, in March, 1832, the first volume of the now famous Contes Drolatiques was published by Gosselin of Paris, Balzac, in a short preface, written in the publisher?s name, replied to those attacks which he anticipated certain critics would make upon his hardy experiment....

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Contents Translators Preface............................................................................................................................ 4 PROLOGUE ..................................................................................................................................... 6 THE FAIR IMPERIA........................................................................................................................ 8 THE VENIAL SIN........................................................................................................................... 21 HOW THE GOOD MAN BRUYN TOOK A WIFE. ......................................................................................... 21 HOW THE SENESCHAL STRUGGLED WITH HIS WIFE?S MODESTY. ................................................. 31 THAT WHICH IS ONLY A VENIAL SIN. ........................................................................................................ 38 HOW AND BY WHOM THE SAID CHILD WAS PROCURED. ................................................................... 44 HOW THE SAID LOVE-SIN WAS REPENTED OF AND LED TO GREAT MOURNING. ................

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Excerpt: King Richard II by William Shakespeare.

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Excerpt: Mugby Junction by Charles Dickens.

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Excerpt: ACT I. SCENE I. Athens. The palace of THESEUS. [Enter THESEUS, HIPPOLYTA, PHILOSTRATE, and Attendants.] THESEUS: Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour Draws on apace; four happy days bring in Another moon: but, O, methinks, how slow This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires, Like to a step-dame or a dowager Long withering out a young man revenue. HIPPOLYTA: Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities....

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Excerpt: ?Halloa! Below there!? When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all....

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Contents: The Signal-Man The Haunted-House The Trial For Murder

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Excerpt: Chapter 1. How Sir Agravaine and Sir Mordred were busy upon Sir Gawaine for to disclose the love between Sir Launcelot and Queen Guenever In May when every lusty heart flourisheth and bourgeoneth, for as the season is lusty to behold and comfortable, so man and woman rejoice and gladden of summer coming with his fresh flowers: for winter with his rough winds and blasts cause a lusty man and woman to cower and sit fast by the fire. So in this season, as in the month of May, it befell a great anger and unhap that stinted not till the flower of chivalry of all the world was destroyed and slain; and all was long upon two unhappy knights the which were named Agravaine and Sir Mordred, that were brethren unto Sir Gawaine....