The thread that runs through this article is made of silk, a fabric with a fascinating history of origins in China and a long record of projects aimed at organizing and mechanizing its production in Europe. The silk motif recurs throughout 19th century literature. As an object of realist description it gives the writer the opportunity to explore its sensuous material appeal and, also, to create around it a web of additional references and associations. For Honoré de Balzac and Bolesław Prus silk carries connotations of elegance, social status and social aspirations. In the fiction of Eliza Orzeszkowa it is one of the regularly recurring elements of descriptions of outward appearance of characters. It can interpreted as a mechanical repetition or, perhaps, the foregrounding of the stereotype meaning of silk intended as an invitation to the moral judgment of characters furnished with that mark.

This article examines the origins and the early decades of the history of the feuilleton in Poland and in France. A comparative analysis shows that the career of this journalistic genre is closely connected with the rise of Romanticism. Both its formal characteristic as well as its hybrid topicality established the feuilleton as an emblematic example of the Romantic poetic. The feuilleton owes its success to the contemporary vogue for commingling literary and journalistic discourses as well as the impact of Romantic writers whose opinion columns became a regular feature of many newspapers.