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