TWO POETS
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,
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