Then, finally, I struggled to rise from under the weight of the anathema.
"But why are these plays so successful?"
"Talma acts in them ..."
"The reputation of these men ..."
"They bring that about themselves through their newspapers!... When M. de Jouy, M. Arnault or M. Lemercier produces a play in which Talma takes no part, you will see it will only run ten nights."
Again I hung down my head.
"Listen, my dear boy," Lassagne went on, with that wonderful sweetness of his in eyes and voice, and above all with that almost fatherly kindliness that I still noticed in him, when I met him by chance twenty-five years later and had the happiness to greet him,—"listen: you want to become a literary man?"
"Oh yes!" I exclaimed.
"Not so loud!" he said, laughing; "you know I told you not to talk so loud about that ... here, at any rate. Well, when you do write, do not take the literature of the Empire as your model: that is my advice."