Jezebels Daughter | Page 4

various forms of publications adopted thus far, addressed itself to a
comparatively limited class of readers in England. When the book is
finally reprinted in its cheapest form--then, and then only, it will appeal
to the great audience of the English people. I am waiting for that time,
to complete my design by writing the second part of "The Fallen
Leaves."
Why?
Your knowledge of English Literature--to which I am indebted for the
first faithful and intelligent translation of my novels into the Italian
language--has long since informed you, that there are certain important
social topics which are held to be forbidden to the English novelist (no
matter how seriously and how delicately he may treat them), by a
narrow-minded minority of readers, and by the critics who flatter their
prejudices. You also know, having done me the honor to read my books,
that I respect my art far too sincerely to permit limits to be wantonly

assigned to it, which are imposed in no other civilized country on the
face of the earth. When my work is undertaken with a pure purpose, I
claim the same liberty which is accorded to a writer in a newspaper, or
to a clergyman in a pulpit; knowing, by previous experience, that the
increase of readers and the lapse of time will assuredly do me justice, if
I have only written well enough to deserve it.
In the prejudiced quarters to which I have alluded, one of the characters
in "The Fallen Leaves" offended susceptibilities of the sort felt by
Tartuffe, when he took out his handkerchief, and requested Dorine to
cover her bosom. I not only decline to defend myself, under such
circumstances as these--I say plainly, that I have never asserted a truer
claim to the best and noblest sympathies of Christian readers than in
presenting to them, in my last novel, the character of the innocent
victim of infamy, rescued and purified from the contamination of the
streets. I remember what the nasty posterity of Tartuffe, in this country,
said of "Basil," of "Armadale," of "The New Magdalen," and I know
that the wholesome audience of the nation at large has done liberal
justice to those books. For this reason, I wait to write the second part of
"The Fallen Leaves," until the first part of the story has found its way to
the people.

Turning for a moment to the present novel, you will (I hope) find two
interesting studies of humanity in these pages.
In the character called "Jack Straw," you have the exhibition of an
enfeebled intellect, tenderly shown under its lightest and happiest
aspect, and used as a means of relief in some of the darkest scenes of
terror and suspense occurring in this story. Again, in "Madame
Fontaine," I have endeavored to work out the interesting moral problem,
which takes for its groundwork the strongest of all instincts in a woman,
the instinct of maternal love, and traces to its solution the restraining
and purifying influence of this one virtue over an otherwise cruel, false,
and degraded nature.
The events in which these two chief personages play their parts have

been combined with all possible care, and have been derived, to the
best of my ability, from natural and simple causes. In view of the
distrust which certain readers feel, when a novelist builds his fiction on
a foundation of fact, it may not be amiss to mention (before I close
these lines), that the accessories of the scenes in the Deadhouse of
Frankfort have been studied on the spot. The published rules and
ground-plans of that curious mortuary establishment have also been
laid on my desk, as aids to memory while I was writing the closing
passages of the story.
With this, I commend "Jezebel's Daughter" to my good friend and
brother in the art--who will present this last work also to the notice of
Italian readers.
W. C.
Gloucester Place, London:
February 9, 1880.

PART I
MR. DAVID GLENNEY CONSULTS HIS MEMORY AND OPENS
THE STORY
CHAPTER I
In the matter of Jezebel's Daughter, my recollections begin with the
deaths of two foreign gentlemen, in two different countries, on the
same day of the same year.
They were both men of some importance in their way, and both
strangers to each other.
Mr. Ephraim Wagner, merchant (formerly of Frankfort-on-the-Main),
died in London on the third day of September, 1828.

Doctor Fontaine--famous in his time for discoveries in experimental
chemistry--died at Wurzburg on the third day of September, 1828.
Both the merchant and the doctor left widows. The merchant's widow
(an Englishwoman) was childless. The doctor's widow (of a South
German family) had a daughter to console her.
At that distant time--I am writing these lines in the year 1878, and
looking back through half