The volume of short stories which, in the first complete edition of the Comedie, opens with Les Marana, contains, with that in which La Recherche de l'Absolu leads off, the very finest productions of the author on a small scale; and they now appear together, La Recherche excepted. Almost all the pieces herein contained were early work, written when Balzac was under the combined excitement of his emergence from the valley of the shadow in which he had toiled so long, and of the heat and stress of the political and literary Revolution of 1830...