Lagardère; or, The Hunchback of Paris

1887 English translation of a novel by French author Paul Henri Corentin Féval originally published in 1857.  Féval, a prolific writer considered the equal of Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue by his contemporaries, was one of the fathers of modern crime fiction—his 1862 novel Jean Diable (John Devil) is considered the first modern detective novel.

Lagardère, the eponymous title for the English translation of Le Bossu, is part crime story, part adventure story, and part romance; in which Lagardère, a chevalier in disgrace and the consummate swordsman of France, sees his somewhat aimless, dissolute life given new meaning and honorable purpose when he becomes involved in an assassination and pledges his vow to the dying victim to avenge his death—absolutely perfect subject matter for the 19th-century audience for whom the story was intended.  And not bad subject matter for a modern audience, either.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.