AUTHOR’S
PREFACE
In the Paris of the Empire there were found Thirteen
men equally impressed with the same idea, equally
endowed with energy enough to keep them true to it,
while among themselves they were loyal enough to keep
faith even when their interests seemed to clash.
They were strong enough to set themselves above all
laws; bold enough to shrink from no enterprise; and
lucky enough to succeed in nearly everything that they
undertook. So profoundly politic were they, that
they could dissemble the tie which bound them together.
They ran the greatest risks, and kept their failures
to themselves. Fear never entered into their
calculations; not one of them had trembled before princes,
before the executioner’s axe, before innocence.
They had taken each other as they were, regardless
of social prejudices. Criminals they doubtless
were, yet none the less were they all remarkable for
some one of the virtues which go to the making of
great men, and their numbers were filled up only from
among picked recruits. Finally, that nothing should
be lacking to complete the dark, mysterious romance
of their history, nobody to this day knows who they
were. The Thirteen once realized all the wildest
ideas conjured up by tales of the occult powers of
a Manfred, a Faust, or a Melmoth; and to-day the band
is broken up or, at any rate, dispersed. Its
members have quietly returned beneath the yoke of
the Civil Code; much as Morgan, the Achilles of piracy,
gave up buccaneering to be a peaceable planter; and,
untroubled by qualms of conscience, sat himself down
by the fireside to dispose of blood-stained booty
acquired by the red light of blazing towns.
After Napoleon’s death, the band was dissolved
by a chance event which the author is bound for the
present to pass over in silence, and its mysterious
existence, as curious, it may be, as the darkest novel
by Mrs. Radcliffe, came to an end.
It was only lately that the present writer, detecting,
as he fancied, a faint desire for celebrity in one
of the anonymous heroes to whom the whole band once
owed an occult allegiance, received the somewhat singular
permission to make public certain of the adventures
which befell that band, provided that, while telling
the story in his own fashion, he observed certain
limits.
The aforesaid leader was still an apparently young
man with fair hair and blue eyes, and a soft, thin
voice which might seem to indicate a feminine temperament.
His face was pale, his ways mysterious. He chatted
pleasantly, and told me that he was only just turned
of forty. He might have belonged to any one of
the upper classes. The name which he gave was
probably assumed, and no one answering to his description
was known in society. Who is he, do you ask?
No one knows.
