THE PILGRIM'S SHELL
: : : : OR : : : :
FERGAN THE QUARRYMAN
A Tale from the Feudal Times
| —By EUGENE SUE— |
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL FRENCH BY
DANIEL DE LEON
—NEW YORK LABOR NEWS COMPANY, 1904—
Copyright, 1904, by the
NEW YORK LABOR NEWS CO.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
——
In my introduction to "The Silver Cross; or, The Carpenter of Nazareth,"I said:
"Eugene Sue wrote in French a monumental work—the Mysteries of thePeople; or, History of a Proletarian Family. It is a 'work of fiction';yet it is the best universal history extant. Better than any work,avowedly on history, it graphically traces the special features of theseveral systems of class-rule as they succeeded each other from epoch toepoch, together with the nature of the struggle between the contendingclasses. The 'Law,' 'Order,' 'Patriotism,' 'Religion,' etc., etc., thateach successive tyrant class, despite its change of form, hystericallyhas sought refuge in in order to justify its criminal existence wheneverthreatened; the varying economic causes of the oppression of thetoilers; the mistakes incurred by these in their struggles for redress;the varying fortunes of the conflict;—all these social dramas aretherein reproduced in a majestic series of 'historic novels,' that coverleading and successive episodes in the history of the race."
The present story—The Pilgrim's Shell; or, Fergan the Quarryman—isone of that majestic series, among the most majestic of the set, and,with regard to the social period that it describes—its institutions,its classes, its manners, its virtues and its crimes, and the charactersthat it builds—the most instructive treatise on feudalism, at the verytime when the bourgeois or capitalist class was struggling for afoot-hold, and beginning to break through the thick feudal incrustationabove. More fully than Molière's plays, and strangely supplemental ofthe best passages on the subject in the novels of George Eliot, ThePilgrim's Shell; or, Fergan the Quarryman chisels the strugglingbourgeois on the feudal groundwork and background, in lines so sharp andtrue that both the present fully developed and ruling capitalist,inheritor of the feudal attribute of plundering, is seen in the historicancestor of his class, and his class' refuse, the modern middle classman, is foreshadowed, now also struggling like his prototype of feudaldays, to keep his head above water, but,