Short Fiction Balzac: Honoré de: The Red Inn. v1, 3 Feb 2018

[AlexBell]

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) 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.

Katherine Prescott Wormeley (1830-1908) was English born and taken to the US as a child. She was a nurse in the Civil War, an author and an editor, and a translator of all of Balzac's works.

The Red Inn was published in 1831, and has three themes: a murder and theft committed thirty years before the story was told at a dinner party, the effect on the perpetrator who listened to the story, and the effect on a young man who had fallen in love with the murderer's daughter.

The text was taken from the University of Adelaide ebook library, and checked against the 1896 Little Brown 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 the US English version of oxforddictionaries.com.

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