Henry James 
Pension Beaurepas 

pub One.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. I was not rich – on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had, moreover, been told that a boarding- house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I had a fancy for a literary career, and a friend of mine had said to me, If you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house; there is no other such place to pick up material. I had read something of this kind in a letter addressed by Stendhal to his sister: I have a passionate desire to know human nature, and have a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where people cannot conceal their real characters. I was an admirer of La Chartreuse de Parme, and it appeared to me that one could not do better than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the magnificent boarding-house in Balzac’s Pere Goriot, – the pension bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres, kept by Madame Vauquer, nee De Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, and I hoped for better things from the Pension Beaurepas