The Firm of Nucingen
Produced by Dagny, and Bonnie Sala THE FIRM OF NUCINGEN BY HONORE DE BALZAC Translated by James Waring TO MADAME ZULMA CARRAUD To whom, madame, but to you should I inscribe this work; to you whose lofty and candid intellect is a treasury to your friends;
hitherto discovered lead to the belief that it was a species of
carnivorous elephant. It is a singular fact that some fishermen,
digging recently on the borders of the Obi, in Siberia, found one
of these animals frozen in a mass of ice, at a depth of sixty feet,
so well preserved that it was still covered with hair, as in life.
They melted the ice to remove the animal, but the skeleton alone
remained complete; the hide was spoiled by contact with the air,
and only a few pieces have been kept, one of which is in the Museum
at Stuttgart. The hairs upon it are as coarse as fine twine, and
nearly a foot long. The entire skeleton is at St. Petersburg in the
Museum, and is larger than the largest elephant. One may judge by
that what havoc such an animal must have made, if it was, as its
teeth show it to have been, carnivorous. But what I would like to
know is how this animal could wander so far north, and then in what
manner it died, to be frozen thus, and remain intact, without
decomposing, perhaps for countless ages. For it must have belonged
to a former creation, since it is nowhere to be found living, and
we have no instance of the disappearance of any kind of animal
within the historic period. There were, besides, many other kinds
of fossil animals. The collection of birds is very beautiful, but
it is a pity that many of them are wrongly named. I corrected a
number myself. . .From Stuttgart we went to Esslingen, where we
were to visit two famous botanists. One was Herr Steudel; a sombre
face, with long overhanging black hair, almost hiding the eyes,--a
very Jewish face. He knows every book on botany that appears, has
read them all, but cares little to see the plants themselves; in
Produced by Dagny, and Bonnie Sala THE FIRM OF NUCINGEN BY HONORE DE BALZAC Translated by James Waring TO MADAME ZULMA CARRAUD To whom, madame, but to you should I inscribe this work; to you whose lofty and candid intellect is a treasury to your friends;