The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Resources of Quinola, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Resources of Quinola

Author: Honore de Balzac

Release Date: July 18, 2005 [EBook #7417]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESOURCES OF QUINOLA ***

Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers

THE RESOURCES OF QUINOLA

A COMEDY IN A PROLOGUE AND FIVE ACTS

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC

First Presented at the Theatre de l'Odeon, Paris March 19, 1842.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

Had the author of the following play written it merely for the purpose
of winning for it the universal praise which the journals have
lavished upon his romances, and which perhaps transcended their
merits, _The Resources of Quinola_ would still have been an excellent
literary speculation; but, when he sees himself the object of so much
praise and so much condemnation, he has come to the conclusion that it
is much more difficult to make successfully a first venture on the
stage than in the field of mere literature, and he has armed himself,
accordingly, with courage, both for the present and for the future.

The day will come when the piece will be employed by critics as a
battering ram to demolish some piece at its first representation, just
as they have employed all his novels and even his play entitled
_Vautrin_, to demolish _The Resources of Quinola_.

However tranquil may be his mood of resignation, the author cannot
refrain from making here two suggestive observations.

Not one among fifty feuilleton writers has failed to treat as a fable,
invented by the author, the historic fact upon which is founded the
present play.

Long before M. Arago mentioned this incident in his history of steam,
published in the _Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes_, the author, to
whom the incident was known, had guessed in imagination the great
drama that must have led up to that final act of despair, the
catastrophe which necessarily ended the career of the unknown
inventor, who, in the middle of the sixteenth century,