What I write, I warn you, M. Guizard, is translated into eight or nine different languages. So we shall have the assistance of learned men in many lands to help us in our researches, and the archæologists of three generations; for, suppose my works live no longer than the time it will take for rats to devour them, it will take those creatures quite a hundred years to eat my thousand volumes. You may tell me that the order to stop M. Théophile Gautier's verses came from a higher source, from the minister. To that I have nothing to say: if the order came from the minister, you were obliged to obey that order. And I must in that case wend my way to M. Léon Faucher. So be it!
O Faucher! is it really credible that you, who are so halfhearted a Republican, you who were so ill-advised, according to my opinion, as to pay a subsidy to the Théâtre-Français to have the dead exhumed and, the living buried,—is it really credible, I repeat, that so indifferent a Republican as yourself, did not wish it said, on the stage that Corneille created, that genius is higher than royalty, and that Corneille was greater as a poet than Louis XIV. was as a monarch?
But, M. Faucher, you know quite as well as I that Louis XIV. was only a great king because he possessed great ministers and great poets.
Perhaps you will tell me that great ministers and poets are created by great kings?
No, M. Faucher, you will not say that; for I shall retort, "Napoleon, who was a great emperor, had no Corneille, and Louis XIII., who was a pitiable king, could boast a Richelieu."
No, M. le ministre, Louis XIV., believe me, was only great as a king because (and Michelet, one of the greatest historians who ever lived, will tell you exactly the same) Richelieu was his precursor, whilst Corneille's precursor was ... who? Jodelle.
Corneille did not need either Condé, or Turenne, or Villars, or de Catinat, or Vauban, or Mazarin, or Colbert, or Louvois, or Boileau, or Racine, or Benserade, or Le Brun, or Le Nôtre, or even M. de Saint-Aignan to help him to become a great poet.
No; Corneille took up a pen, ink and paper; he only had to lean his head upon his hand and his poetry came.
Had you but read Théophile Gautier's lines, M. le ministre,—but I am sure you have not read them,—you must have seen that these verses are not merely the finest Théophile Gautier ever penned, but the finest ever written since verses came to be written. You must have seen that their composition was excellent and their ideas above reproach. A certain emperor I knew—one whom apparently you did not know—would have sent the officer's Cross of the Legion of Honour and a pension to a man who had written those verses.