![]() ![]() The textual history gives rise to many problems that need not concern us here, but the changes in the title are significant. In the edition published in 1847, Le Provincial à Paris, he made further differences, including a change in the title the story was now called "Gillette." It is as "Gillette, or the Unknown Masterpiece" that Anthony Rudolf's excellent modern translation was published. ![]() ![]() The first section was now headed "Gillette." For an edition of his Études philosophiques, published in 1837, Balzac made extensive additions, mainly involving Frenhofer's ideas on art. Its two sections were headed "Maître Frenhofer" and "Catherine Lescault." Expanded and amended, it appeared in the same year in volume 3 of Balzac's Romans et contes philosophiques. "The Unknown Masterpiece" was first published in the periodical L'Artiste in 1831. It is a masterpiece of compression that invites critical expansion, as it were, in a great many different idioms and directions. In "The Unknown Masterpiece," however, we are challenged and delighted not by a work of immense scale but by a novella both stringent in design and resonant of meaning. Given the sprawling abundance of La Comédie humaine, one does not immediately think of Honoré de Balzac as a master of concentration. ![]()
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