Excerpt from Cousin Pons, And, Old Goriot One of the last and largest of Balzac's great works - the very last of them, if we except La Cousine Bette, to which it is pendant and contrast - Le Cousin Pons has always united sufirages from very different classes of admirers. In the first place, it is not disagreeable, as the common euphemism has it, and as La Cousine Bette certainly is. In the second, it cannot be accused of being a berguinade, as those who like Balzac best when he is doing moral rag picking are apt to describe books like Le Medecin de Campagne and Le Lys dans la Vallee, if not even like Eugenie Grandet. It has a considerable variety of inter est; its central figure is curiously pathetic and attractive, even though the curse of something like folly, which so often attends Balzac's good characters, may a little weigh on him. It would be a book of exceptional charm even if it were anonymous, or if we knew no more about the author than we know about Shakespeare. 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.