Two Poets

TWO POETS(Lost Illusions Part I). By Honore De Balzac. Translated By Ellen Marriage. PREPARERS NOTE. Two Poets is part one of a trilogy and begins the story of Lucien his sister Eve and his friend David in the provincial town of Angouleme. Part two A Distinguished Provincial at Paris is centered on Luciens Parisian life. Part three Eve and David reverts to the setting of Angouleme. In many references parts one and three are combined under the title Lost Illusions and A Distinguished Provincial at Paris is given its individual title. Following this trilogy Luciens story is continued in another book Scenes from a Courtesans Life.. 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 in those days. Leather ink balls were still used in old fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters and the movable table on which the form of type was placed in readiness for the sheet of paper being made of marble literally deserved its name of impression stone. Modern machinery has swept all this old world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press which with all its imperfections turned out such beautiful work for the Elzevirs Plantin Aldus and Didot is so completely forgotten that something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which Jerome Nicolas Sechard set an almost superstitious affection for it plays a part in this chronicle of great small things.