Will this moral cosmopolitanism, the hope of Christian Rome, prove to be only a sublime error? It is so natural to believe in the realization of a noble vision, in the Brotherhood of Man. But, alas! the human machine does not have such divine proportions. Souls that are vast enough to grasp a range of feelings bestowed on great men only will never belong to either fathers of families or simple citizens. Some physiologists have thought that as the brain enlarges the heart narrows; but they are mistaken. The apparent egotism of men who bear a science, a nation, a code of laws in their bosom is the noblest of passions; it is, as one may say, the maternity of the masses; to give birth to new peoples, to produce new ideas they must unite within their mighty brains the breasts of woman and the force of God. The history of such men as Innocent the Third and Peter the Great, and all great leaders of their age and nation will show, if need be, in the highest spheres the same vast thought of which Troubert was made the representative in the quiet depths of the Cloister of Saint-Gatien. ADDENDUM The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy. Birotteau, Abbe Francois The Lily of the Valley Cesar Birotteau Bourbonne, De Madame Firmiani Listomere, Baronne de Cesar Birotteau The Muse of the Department Troubert, Abbe Hyacinthe The Member for Arcis Villenoix, Pauline Salomon de Louis Lambert A Seaside Tragedy THE TWO BROTHERS BY HONORE DE BALZAC Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley DEDICATION To Monsieur Charles Nodier, member of the French Academy, etc. Here, my dear Nodier, is a book filled with deeds that are screened from the action of the laws by the closed doors of domestic life; but as to which the finger of God, often called chance, supplies the place of human justice, and in which the moral is none the less striking and instructive because it is pointed by a scoffer.