XX. THE PEASANT STORY OF NAPOLEON
From "The Country Doctor,"
by Honoré de Balzac. Translated
by Katharine Prescott
Wormeley.




INTRODUCTION


When the traveller looks at Rome for the first time he does not realize
that there have been several cities on the same piece of ground, and
that the churches and palaces and other great buildings he sees to-day
rest on an earlier and invisible city buried in dust beneath the
foundations of the Rome of the Twentieth Century. In like manner, and
because all visible things on the surface of the earth have grown out of
older things which have ceased to be, the world of habits, the ideas,
customs, fancies, and arts, in which we live is a survival of a younger
world which long ago disappeared. When we speak of Friday as an unlucky
day, or touch wood after saying that we have had good luck for a long
time, or take the trouble to look at the new moon over the right
shoulder, or avoid crossing the street while a funeral is passing, we
are recalling old superstitions or beliefs, a vanished world in which
our remote forefathers lived.

We do not realize how much of this vanished world still survives in our
language, our talk, our books, our sculpture and pictures. The plays of
Shakespeare are full of reference to the fancies and beliefs of the