Excerpt from La M re de la Marquise Edmond - fran ois-valentin about, the author of the accompanying story, was born at Dieuze, in Lorraine, on February 14, 1828. He followed the course of the French schools and in time was graduated from the Ecole normale, whence his taste for classical studies led him to the French school at Athens. In 1853, About te turned to Paris and began to write for the newspapers, especially for the Moniteur, Figaro, and Soir, and shortly after, in 1855, he published La Gr ce contemporaine, a bright, though hardly just satire on the manners and customs of the people he had just left. 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.