"Yes."
"Well, what do you think of it?"
"I think you read as though you had just succeeded Bonaparte as a member of the Institute, instead of M. Lemercier as a member of the Academy."
"The deuce! I would much rather have seen you there than myself. How would you have got out of it?"
"As Racan did, by saying my big white rabbit had eaten my speech."
Racan, it will be remembered, once presented himself before the Academy with the scraps of a speech he had meant to read.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I had prepared a splendid speech, which could not fail to have won your suffrages; but my big white rabbit gobbled it up this morning.... I have brought you the remains, and you must try to make the best you can of them!"
"Ah! indeed," replied Hugo; "I could have done that, but it never occurred to me."
M. Liadière's Jane Shore did for Mademoiselle Georges what M. Lemercier's Jane Shore had done for Talma. It was, besides, the first attempt Mademoiselle Georges had made in Shakespearean drama: she led up to it in Christine and in Lucrèce Borgia.
It was the age of limitations; no one was strong enough to be original. They had to look for fresh things across the frontier; they sought admission to the theatres on the shoulders of Rowe or Schiller: if they were successful, they quietly put the German or English author outside; if they came a cropper, they fell on him, and it broke the shock of their fall.