These to Bonaparte:—
... C'était trop pour moi des lauriers de la guerre;
Je voulais une gloire et plus rare et plus chère.
Rome, en proie aux fureurs des partis triomphants,
Mourante sous les coups de ses propres enfants,
Invoquait à la fois mon bras et mon génie:
Je me fis dictateur, je sauvai la patrie!"
These to Napoleon:—
"J'ai gouverné le monde à mes ordres soumis,
Et j'impose silence à tous mes ennemis!
Leur haine ne saurait atteindre ma mémoire,
J'ai mis entre eux et moi l'abîme de ma gloire."
When one re-reads at the end of ten, twenty, or thirty years either the lines which the Censorship forbade, or the plays it suppressed, one is completely amazed at the stupidity of Governments. As soon as a revolution has cut off the seven heads of a literary hydra, governments make all speed to collect them again and to stick them back on the trunk that feigned death whilst taking care not to lose its hold on life. As though the Censorship had ever annihilated any of the works that have been forbidden to be played! As though the Censorship had strangled Tartuffe, Mahomet, le Mariage de Figaro, Charles IX., Pinto, Marion Delorme and Antony! No, when one of these virile pieces is hounded from the theatre where it has made its mark, it waits, calm and erect, until those who have proscribed it fall or pass away, and, when they are fallen or dead, when its persecutors are hurled from their thrones, or entering their tombs, the calm and immortal daughter of Genius, omnipotent and great, enters the enclosure that the mannikins have closed against her, from whence they have disappeared, and their forgotten crowns being too small for her brow become the sport of her feet.
The curtain fell in the midst of immense applause. I was stunned, dazzled, fascinated. Adolphe proposed we should go to Talma's dressing-room to thank him. I followed him through that inextricable labyrinth of corridors which wind about the back regions of the Théâtre-Français, and which to-day unfortunately are no longer unknown regions to me. No client who ever knocked at the door of the original Sylla felt his heart beat so fast and so furiously as did mine at the door of the actor who had just personated him. De Leuven pushed open the door. The great actor's dressing-room lay before us: it was full of men whom I did not know, who were all famous or about to become famous. There was Casimir Delavigne, who had just written the last scenes of l'École des Vieillards; there was Lucien Arnault, who had just had his Régulus performed; there was Soumet, still very proud of his twofold success of Saül and of Clytemnestre; there was Népomucène Lemercier, that paralysed sulky brute, whose talents were as crooked as his body, who in his healthy moments had composed Agamemnon, Pinto, and Fridegonde, and in his unhealthy hours Christophe Colomb, la Panhypocrisiade, and Cahin-Caha; there was Delrieu, who had been at work upon the revised version of his Artaxerch, since 1809; there was Viennet, whose tragedies made a sensation for fifteen or twenty years on paper, to live and agonise and die within a week, like him whose reign lasted two hours and whose torture three days; there was, finally, the hero of the hour, M. de Jouy, with his tall figure, his fine white head, his intellectual and kindly eyes, and in the centre of them all—Talma in his simple white robe, just despoiled of its purple, his head from which he had just removed the crown and his two graceful white hands with which he had just broken the Dictator's palm. I stayed at the door, blushing vividly, and very humble.
"Talma," said Adolphe, "we have come to thank you." Talma looked round out of his eye-corners. He perceived me at the door.
"Ah! ah!" he said; "come in."
I took two steps towards him.
"Well, Mr. Poet," said he, "were you satisfied?"