es, so many high
and noble self-devotions will be set forth, that I may here be allowed
to point out the depraving effect of the necessities of war upon certain
minds who venture to act in domestic life as if upon the field of
battle.

You have cast a sagacious glance over the events of our own time; its
philosophy shines, in more than one bitter reflection, through your
elegant pages; you have appreciated, more clearly than other men,
the havoc wrought in the mind of our country by the existence of four
distinct political systems. I cannot, therefore, place this history
under the protection of a more competent authority. Your name may,
perhaps, defend my work against the criticisms that are certain to
follow it,--for where is the patient who keeps silence when the surgeon
lifts the dressing from his wound?

To the pleasure of dedicating this Scene to you, is joined the pride I
feel in thus making known your friendship for one who here subscribes
himself

Your sincere admirer,

De Balzac
Paris, November, 1842.

THE TWO BROTHERS

CHAPTER I

In 1792 the townspeople of Issoudun enjoyed the services of a physician
named Rouget, whom they held to be a man of consummate malignity. Were
we to believe certain bold tongues, he made his wife extremely unhappy,
although she was the most beautiful woman of the neighborhood. Perhaps,
indeed, she was rather silly. But the prying of friends, the slander of
enemies, and the gossip of acquaintances, had never succeeded in laying
bare the interior of that household. Doctor Rouget was a man of whom we
say in common parlance, "He is not pleasant to deal with." Consequently,
during his lifetime, his townsmen kept silence about him and treated him
civilly. His wife, a demoiselle Descoings, feeble in health during her
girlhood (which was said to be a reason why the doctor married her),
gave birth to a son, and also to a daughter who arrived, unexpectedly,
ten years after her brother, and whose birth took the husband, doctor
though he were, by surprise. This late-comer was named Agathe.

These little facts are so simple, so commonplace, that a writer seems
scarcely justified in placing them in the fore-front of his history; yet
if they are not known, a man of Doctor Rouget's stamp would be thought
a monster, an unnatural father, when, in point of fact,