two of these chapters had
been inserted a few days before the publications in the _Estafette_.
Here Canalis was more distinctly identified with Lamartine than in the
subsequent texts. The third part, unlike its forerunners, appeared
serially in two papers, _L'Etat_ and _Le Parisien_, in the year 1843,
under the title of _David Sechard, ou les Souffrances d'un Inventeur_,
and next year became a book under the first title only. But before
this last issue it had been united to the other two parts, and had
appeared as _Eve et David_ in the first edition of the _Comedie.

George Saintsbury

I

TWO POETS
(Lost Illusions Part I)

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By
Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION

To Monsieur Victor Hugo,

It was your birthright to be, like a Rafael or a Pitt, a great
poet at an age when other men are children; it was your fate, the
fate of Chateaubriand and of every man of genius, to struggle
against jealousy skulking behind the columns of a newspaper, or
crouching in the subterranean places of journalism. For this
reason I desired that your victorious name should help to win a
victory for this work that I inscribe to you, a work which, if
some persons are to be believed, is an act of courage as well as a
veracious history. If there had been journalists in the time of
Moliere, who can doubt but that they, like marquises, financiers,
doctors, and lawyers, would have been within the province of the
writer of plays? And why should Comedy, _qui castigat ridendo
mores_, make an exception in favor of one power, when the Parisian
press spares none? I am happy, monsieur, in this opportunity of
subscribing myself your sincere admirer and friend,

DE BALZAC.

TWO POETS

At the time when this story opens, the Stanhope press and the
ink-distributing roller were not as yet in general use in small
provincial printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely
connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris,
the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which
the language owes a figure of speech--"the press groans" was no mere
rhetorical expression i