Melmoth Reconciled

Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac is about the Melmoth the Wanderer is an 1820 Gothic novel by Irish playwright, novelist, and clergyman Charles Maturin. The novel's titular character is a scholar who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 extra years of life and searches the world for someone who will take over the pact for him, in a manner reminiscent of the Wandering Jew. Excerpt: "There is a special variety of human nature obtained in the Social Kingdom by a process analogous to that of the gardener's craft in the Vegetable Kingdom, to wit, by the forcing-house—a species of hybrid which can be raised neither from seed nor from slips. This product is known as the Cashier, an anthropomorphous growth, watered by religious doctrine, trained up in fear of the guillotine, pruned by vice, to flourish on a third floor with an estimable wife by his side and an uninteresting family."