We betook ourselves to the Palais-Royal, where indeed we dined excellently for our six francs, or rather for General Verdier's six francs. Then we went to take our places for Régulus. My mind was still full of Sylla; I saw the gloomy Dictator enter with his flattened locks, his crowned head, his forehead furrowed with anxieties: his speech was deliberate, almost solemn; his glance—that of a lynx and a hyena—shot from under his drooping eyelids like that of a nocturnal animal which sees in the darkness.
Thus I awaited Talma.
He entered, at a rapid pace, with haughty head and terse speech, as befitted the general of a free people and a conquering nation; he entered, in short, as Régulus would have entered. No longer, the toga, no longer the purple, no longer the crown: a simple tunic, bound by an iron girdle, without any other cloak than that of the soldier. Here was where Talma was admirable in his personality—always that of the hero he was called upon to represent—he reconstructed a world, he refashioned an epoch.
Yes, in Sylla he was the man of the falling republic; he was the man who, in putting aside the purple, and in restoring to Rome that temporary independence which she was soon no longer to know, said, to those who assisted at this great act of his public life:—
"J'achève un grand destin; j'achève un grand ouvrage;
Sur ce monde étonné, j'ai marqué mon passage.
Ne m'accusez jamais dans la postérité,
Romains, de vous avoir rendu la liberté!"
It was Sylla who, in Marius and with Marius, witnessed the expiration of the last breath of republican virility; it was he who saw the rise of Cæsar—that Cæsar who later spoke thus to Brutus:—
"O le pauvre insensé! qui vient, du couchant sombre,
Demander la lumière, et qui marche vers l'ombre!
Et qui se croit, rêvant les antiques vertus,
Au siècle des Camille et des Cincinnatus!
Oui, leur siècle était grand, peut-être regrettable;
Oui, la simplicity des habits, de la table;
Cette orge qui bouillait sur le plat des Toscans;
Ce peu qu'on avait d'or, qui reluisant aux camps;
Annibal, sous nos murs plantant sa javeline;
Et nos guerriers debout sur la porte Colline;
Voilà qui défendait au vice d'approcher!...
Mais le Nil dans le Tibre est venu s'épancher,
Et l'or asiatique, aux mains sacerdotales,
A remplacé l'argile étrusque des vestales;
Et le luxe, fondant sur nous comme un vautour,
Venge les nations et nous dompte à son tour.
La Rome des consuls et de la république
A brisé dès longtemps sa ceinture italique.
Rome a conquis la Grèce, et Carthage, et le Pont;
Rome a conquis l'Espagne et la Gaule.—Répond,
Toi, qui ne veux pas voir, comme une mer de lave,
Monter incessamment vers nous le monde esclave:
Cette ville aux sept monts, qu'un dieu même créa,
Est-ce toujours la fille et l'Albe et de Rhéa,
La matrone sévère ou bien la courtisane?...
Ville de Mithridate et d'Ariobarzane,
Ville de Ptolémée, et ville de Juba.
Rome est un compost de tout ce qui tomba!
Rome, c'est l'univers! et sa débauche accuse
Marseille, Alexandrie, Athènes, Syracuse,
Et Rhode et Sybaris, fécondes en douleurs,
Et Tarente lascive, au front chargé de fleurs!..."
Well, it was in this first epoch, spoken of by Cæsar, when "l'orge bouillait sur le plat des Toscans," that Regulus flourished. Therefore, from his very entry, Talma appeared as the stern republican, the man vowed to great causes. Yes, yes, Talma, you were indeed, this time, the Punic warrior, the colleague of Duillius—that conqueror to whom his contemporaries, still in ignorance of the titles and the honours with which defenders of their country should be rewarded, were giving a flute player to follow him wherever he went, and a rostral column to set up in front of his house; yes, you were indeed the consul who, when he landed on African shores, had to beat down monsters before he could beat down men, and who tested the implements of war, which were destined to break down the walls of Carthage, by crushing a boa-constrictor a hundred cubits in length. You were indeed that man whose two victories spelt two hundred towns, and who refused Carthage peace: Carthage, the Queen of the Mediterranean, the Sovereign of the Ocean, who had coasted down Africa as far as the Equator, who had spread North as far as the Cassiterides, and who possessed armed ships. O Carthaginians, merchants, lawyers and senators! you were lost at last. The race of traders had to give way to the race of warriors, speculators to soldiers, Hannons to Barcas; you would have consented to all the demands of Regulus, if there had not been found in Carthage a Lacedemonian, a mercenary, a Xantippe, who declared that Carthage still possessed the means for resisting, and demanded the chief command of the armies. The command was given him. He was a Greek. He lured the Romans into the plain, charged into them with his cavalry and crushed them beneath his elephants. It was at this stage of affairs, O Regulus—Talma that you made your entry into Carthage, but conquered, and a prisoner!
Lucien Arnault had certainly not extracted all the dramatic force out of this splendid republican subject that it was capable of showing: he had certainly not shown us Rome, patient and indefatigable as the ploughing oxen; he had certainly not depicted commercial Carthage, with its armies of condottieri recruited from the sturdy Ligurians, that Strabo shows us, in the mountains of Genes, breaking down the rocks and carrying enormous burdens; from those clever slingers who came from the Balearic Isles, who could stop a stag in its flight, an eagle on the wing, with their stone-throwing; from the sturdy and strong Iberians, who seemed insensible to hunger and to fatigue, when they were marching to battle with their red cloaks and their two-edged-swords; finally, from the Numidians whom we fight even to-day at Constantine and at Djidjelli, terrible cavaliers, centaurs thin and fiery like their chargers. No,—although the epoch was not remote,—the piece lacked poetry; you, my dear Lucien, simply extracted from this mass of material the devotion of a single man, and did not choose to depict a people.
Talma was superb when he was urging the Roman Senate to refuse peace, thereby condemning himself to death; Talma was magnificent in that last cry which hung for two centuries after, like a menace, over the city of Dido: "To Carthage! to Carthage!"