A little while back, after a 40-year career in publishing, I sat down to enjoy reading my favorite French classics, but this time in English. I was amazed and very displeased to find that even the most expensive editions offered less than totally accurate translation of the works; not to mention many translator's mania to go off on their own tangent, adding new words—or phrases—to the author's original text. Let us be clear, the classics are such because the authors were brilliant writers who took great care in choosing accurate words; when I read Voltaire I am not interested in reading a translator's middling description of a scene, or a translator's clarification of a word or name of a personage mentioned in the text. So, I ventured, as a hobby and to amuse myself, to give some of these classic books my own translated version, unadulterated and without my own interpretation of the text; just pure and straightforward translation of the text as the author wrote it.