Balzac, Honoré de: The Atheist's Mass and Other Stories
 

Honoré de Balzac helped to establish the current form of the novel, and was one of the greatest and most prolific novelists and short story writers of all time. Nearly a hundred of his novels and short stories formed La Comédie humaine, in which some characters occur in several stories.

Clara Bell (1835-1927) was an English translator who was fluent in eight languages and raised six children.

George Saintsbury (1845-1933) was an English writer, literary historian, scholar, critic and wine connoisseur who edited an English edition of La Comédie humaine published in 1895-98 by J. M. Dent & Co., and E. P. Dutton Co.

This ebook contains five short stories: The Atheist's Mass, Honorine, Colonel Chabert, The Commission in Lunacy, and Piere Grassou, five scenes from private life in 19th century Paris.

The texts were taken from The University of Adelaide ebook library, Wikisource, and the Dent/Dutton edition in the Internet Archive. I have silently corrected typos, curled quotes, replaced italics, diacritics, and scene breaks, and made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.