Excerpt from Seraphita Le Bal de Sceaux, with its satire on contempt for trade, is in some ways more like Balzac's young friend and pupil Charles de Bernard than like himself; and I believe it at tracted English notice pretty early. At least I seem, when quite a boy, and long before I read the Comedie Humaine, to have seen an English version or paraphrase of it. Le Bal de Sceaux was an original Scene de la Vie Privee, and seems to have been written as well as published more or less at the same time. It at first had an alternative title, Ou le Pair de France, which was afterward dropped. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.