title: Ourika: The Original French Text (Texts and Translations) (French Edition)
author: Joan DeJean
description: Joan DeJean's books reflect her areas of research: the history of women's writing in France (<em>Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France</em>); the history of sexuality (<em>Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937</em>); the development of the novel (<em>Literary Fortifications</em>; <em>Libertine Strategies</em>); and the cultural history and the material culture of late 17th- and early 18th-century France (<em>Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Sicle</em>; <em>The Essence of Style, 2005; The Age of Comfort</em>).
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  # A Daughter of Eve
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Honore de Balzac
  
  
  ##### Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
  
  
  DEDICATION
  
  
  
  
  
  To Madame la Comtesse Bolognini, nee Vimercati.
  
  
  
  
  
  If you remember, madame, the pleasure your conversation gave to a
  
  
  traveller by recalling Paris to his memory in Milan, you will not
  
  
  be surprised to find him testifying his gratitude for many
  
  
  pleasant evenings passed beside you by laying one of his works at
  
  
  your feet, and begging you to protect it with your name, as in
  
  
  former days that name protected the tales of an ancient writer
  
  
  dear to the Milanese.
  
  
  
  
  
  You have an Eugenie, already beautiful, whose intelligent smile
  
  
  gives promise that she has inherited from you the most precious
  
  
  gifts of womanhood, and who will certainly enjoy during her
  
  
  childhood and youth all those happinesses which a rigid mother
  
  
  denied to the Eugenie of these pages. Though Frenchmen are taxed
  
  
  with inconstan