He wrote a hymn for the king's coronation which earned him a whole silver service,--having refused a sum of money on the ground that a Canalis owed his duty to his sovereign.
But about this time Canalis had, as the journalists say, exhausted his budget.

He felt himself unable to invent any new form of poetry; his lyre did not have seven strings, it had one; and having played on that one string so long, the public allowed him no other alternative but to hang himself with it, or to hold his tongue.

De Marsay, who did not like Canalis, made a remark whose poisoned shaft touched the poet to the quick of his vanity.

"Canalis," he said, "always reminds me of that brave man whom Frederic the Great called up and commended after a battle because his trumpet had never ceased tooting its one little tune." Canalis's ambition was to enter political life, and he made capital of a journey he had taken to Madrid as secretary to the embassy of the Duc de Chaulieu, though it was really made, according to Parisian gossip, in the capacity of "attache to the duchess." How many times a sarcasm or a single speech has decided the whole course of a man's life.

Colla, the late president of the Cisalpine republic, and the best lawyer in Piedmont, was told by a friend when he was forty years of age that he knew nothing of botany.