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, built a ship that moved by steam in the harbor of Barcelona, and then scuttled it with his own hands in the presence of two hundred thousand spectators. This observation is sufficient answer to the derision which has been flung upon what was supposed to be the author's hypothesis as to the invention of steam locomotion before the time of the Marquis of Worcester, Salomon de Caus and Papin. The second observation relates to the strange manner in which almost all the critics have mistaken the character of Lavradi, one of the personages in this comedy, which they have stigmatized as a hideous creation. Any one who reads the piece, of which no critic has given an exact analysis, will see that Lavradi, sentenced to be transported for ten years to the _presides_, comes to ask pardon of the king. Every one knows how freely the severest penalties were in the sixteenth century measured out for the lightest offences, and how warmly valets in a predicament such as Quinola's, were welcomed by the spectators in the antique theatres.