d still lived on newspapers; who himself had been the
chief managing editor, tenor, Jack-of-all-trades, canard-seller,
camarillist, politician, premier-Paris, fait-Paris, _detache-attache_,
pamphleteer, translator, critic, euphuist, bravo, incense-bearer,
guerillero, angler, humbug, and even, what was more serious, the
banker of a paper of which he was the only, unique, and perpetual
_gendelettre_, and which, so admirably written, cleverly conducted,
and signed with so great a name, did not live six months.

Within a very few years, Janin was to bury the hatchet of polemics
beside Balzac's grave, and, forgetting the soreness generated in him
by the _Monography of the Press_ to constitute himself the dead
author's apologist.

Besides his continuation of Lucien de Rubempre's story in the
_Splendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans_, Balzac published, in the
year 1843, two complete novels, viz. _Honorine_, and _The Muse of the
County_, and a portion of an historical study on Catherine de Medici.
This last work, to which the _Calvinist Martyr_ belongs, was
undertaken with the idea of composing, as he said, a retrospective
history of France treated clairvoyantly, and, as the fragment shows,
with his peculiar bias towards despotism. In the experiment made with
_Catherine de Medici_, he started out thinking to justify and
rehabilitate her memory. Instead, he found himself obliged to exhibit
her committing the worst actions imaginable; and, his conclusions not
concording with his premises, he abandoned further incursions into the
past. History is a dangerous ground for a doctrinaire to investigate.

The former of the two novels is mainly psychological. The wife of a
Count Octave, having quitted her husband for another, has repented of
her fault and separated from her lover, but, through shamefastness,
will not return to her husband. She seeks to gain a livelihood by
flower-making; and her husband, who still loves her and is full of
forgiveness, helps her secretly to obtain orders. At length, by the
good offices of a secretary and the latter's uncle, a priest, he
pleads with his wife more efficaciously, and induces her to return to
him, yet without her pardoning herself; and she dies in giving birth
to a child, dies because she wishes, rather from wounded pride, it
would appear, than on account of her husband, to whose affection she
is strangely insensible. The heroine is not particularly interesting
with her morbidness and hys