Reflecting on the ills of society, and remarking everywhere the beginnings of material for such a history, I perceived perhaps more clearly than those who possessed it, for French society was to be the historian, and I was to be merely its secretary. In drawing up the inventory of vices and virtues, in gathering the principal facts of the passions, in painting characters, in choosing the main events of society, in composing types by uniting the features of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I could attain that degree of writing which the most ancient monuments have allowed us to glimpse. It seemed to me then that this book must have a poetics as it has a science. The History of France is the beginning of history; that history may be lacking, it will not possess the strange reality I wish to give to mine. Society, the social, or the social phenomenon, such is my subject. Thought, or passion, which is the burning manifestation of thought, in tearing and gnawing at a body, communicates to that body phenomena which are precisely the object of my work. Indeed, passion has its physiognomies as it has its habits, its settings, its faces. There is a social fact, just as there is a historical fact, a physical fact, a moral fact; all must be studied. Thus I have sought the social cause of social effects. I wish to give social thought the same life that society has in its actual movement. In painting society, I have wished to subject it to the analysis of our age; it was therefore necessary to find not one or two, but fifty women, twenty men of every condition, miseries and splendors, private life and public life. Chance is the greatest novelist in the world: to be fruitful, one need only study chance. French society is the true author of this history; I am only its historiographer. Within every man there is a world, and within humanity, infinite worlds. Man resolves into two natures: there is the intimate man and the exterior man; and these two men contend without ceasing. Passion is not an isolated phenomenon; it is a struggle. Ideas are the emanations of principles that unroll their consequences in man. As passions are varied, so are their effects. Manners are the idea of the drama; events are its beginning. The slightest fact, the most trivial, an accident of private life, is found bound, in human societies, to a chain of circumstances in which it may become a national catastrophe. A banker is ruined, a family dishonored, a child abandoned: these seemingly harmless facts are the cornerstones of entire societies. Literature, in depicting the passions, vices and virtues of society, therefore places itself on the level of the positive sciences; it joins them through the curiosity of its observations and the rigor of its analyses. The novelist of today must be the doctor of society, the chemist of the passions, the naturalist of manners. Society transforms itself; the men of every epoch resemble one another, but each century renews its situations and its manners; the types must therefore be renewed. Thus my work has its zone, its atmosphere, its climate: it is the France of the last forty years, with its bourgeois, its workers, its peasants, its courtesans and its bankers, its heirs and those they have despoiled. There I have seen the same effects produced, and the same causes: money is the most active force of our civilization; it corrupts and it elevates, it creates vices and it creates virtues. In modern society there is a force more terrible than the ambition of old: money, which is the nerve of all human actions, is the principle of a new social science. This book, I write it for all: for those who seek in the pictures of society a lesson, and for those who wish to find there the mirror of their miseries or their greatness. I have faith in the future of this work, because I have deduced it from real social facts. The writer who would be an observer must live among men, listen to their conversations, surprise their secrets, pass from drawing rooms to garrets; society is a theater in which every box stands open to whoever cares to know it. There, as in nature, there are social species, genera, families; the naturalist of manners classifies them, studies them, depicts them with the same patience with which the botanist studies his flowers and the zoologist his animals. If this idea is true, if man carries within him society entire, then the novelist may undertake everything: he may paint the thousand faces of life, the struggles of money, the anguishes of conscience, the delicacies of the heart, and say to himself, at the end of his labor, that he has invented nothing, but has restored to society what it gave him: the truth of its figures and the light of its history.