Replying to this diatribe, with its medley of shrewdness and exaggeration, Janin pointed out that it insulted Quinet, professor at the College de France; Sainte-Beuve, the poet, novelist, and critic, the historian of Port-Royal; Philarete Chasles, professor of Foreign Literature; Loeve Weimars, Consul at Bagdad; not to speak of Planche, Berlioz, Michel and Chevalier; and that it came amiss from a man who had lived and still lived on newspapers; who himself had been the chief managing editor, tenor, Jack-of-all-trades, canard-seller, camarillist, politician, premier-Paris, fait-Paris, _detache-attache_, pamphleteer, translator, critic, euphuist, bravo, incense-bearer, guerillero, angler, humbug, and even, what was more serious, the banker of a paper of which he was the only, unique, and perpetual _gendelettre_, and which, so admirably written, cleverly conducted, and signed with so great a name, did not live six months. Within a very few years, Janin was to bury the hatchet of polemics beside Balzac's grave, and, forgetting the soreness generated in him by the _Monography of the Press_ to constitute himself the dead author's apologist. Besides his continuation of Lucien de Rubempre's story in the _Splendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans_, Balzac published, in the year 1843, two complete novels, viz. _Honorine_, and _The Muse of the County_, and a portion of an historical study on Catherine de Medici. This last work, to which the _Calvinist Martyr_ belongs, was undertaken with the idea of composing, as he said, a retrospective history of France treated clairvoyantly, and, as the fragment shows, with his peculiar bias towards despotism. In the experiment made with _Catherine de Medici_, he started out thinking to justify and rehabilitate her memory. Instead, he found himself obliged to exhibit her committing the worst actions imaginable; and, his conclusions not concording with his premises, he abandoned further incursions into the past. History is a dangerous ground for a doctrinaire to investigate.