The Elixir of Life
The Elixir of Life
by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring
TO THE READER
At the very outset of the writer's literary career, a friend, long since dead, gave him the subject of this Study. Later on he found the same story in a collection published about the beginning of the present century. To the best of his belief, it is some stray fancy of the brain of Hoffmann of Berlin; probably it appeared in some German almanac, and was omitted in the published ...