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"Le Charbon ardent" in Balzac's La Recherche de l'Absolu and "Des artistes".

Honore de Balzac's manipulation ofthe biblical term charbon ardent in his 1830 article entitled "Des artistes" and in his 1834 novel La Recherche de l'Absolu exposes his efforts to redefine the artist. The "live coal" marks the moment of poetic inspiration in "Des artistes" and, in La Recherche de l'Absolu, is applied to the transfer of knowledge from one alchemist to another. The biblical image of the coal, functioning both metaphorically and literally, thus applied to the artist and to the alchemist, echoes the academic definition of the artist. The Dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise included the alchemist in its definition of the term up through the fifth edition (1798), although ...

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