"Yes, sire."
"Add a second pension of one hundred louis to that which he already has."
And they added one hundred louis to the pension already drawn by Lebrun, who went by the name of Lebrun-Pindare, because he turned out ten thousand lines of this kind of thing:—
"La colline qui vers le pôle
Domine d'antiques marais,[1]
Occupe les enfants d'Éole[2]
A broyer les dons de Cérès;[3]
Vanvres, qu'habite Galatée,[4]
Du nectar d'Io, d'Amalthée,
Epaissit les flots écumeux;
Et Sèvres, de sa pure argile,
Nous pétrit l'albâtre fragile
Où Moka nous verse ses feux."[5]
But something happened that no one had foreseen: there lived another poet called Pierre Lebrun—not Lebrun-Pindare. The ode was written by Pierre Lebrun, not by Lebrun-Pindare. So it came to pass that Lebrun-Pindare enjoyed for a long time the pension earned by Pierre Lebrun. Thus we see that Napoleon did his utmost to discover poets, and that it was not his fault if they were not found.
When Casimir Delavigne published his first work in 1811, a dithyrambic to the King of Rome, it began with this line:—
"Destin, qui m'as promis l'empire de la terre!"
Napoleon scented a poet, and, although the lines smacked of the schoolboy, he bestowed the academic prize and a post in the excise on the author.
Talma was poetry personified. So, since 1792, Napoleon had allied himself with Talma. Where did he spend his evenings? In the wings of the Théâtre-Français; and more than once, pointing out the man who, twenty years later, was to send from Moscow his famous decree concerning comedians, the porter asked Talma—