Lassailly tried to throw himself into my arms, made an attempt to embrace me and called me his saviour; but I gently pushed him away, pointed with my hand to the drawer and repeated—
"There, there ... take it; ... take a hundred and thirty francs, and leave me five."
He took the sum and left, and when he had gone I resumed and finished my scene between Paula and Monaldeschi. A fortnight later, the first, and to be accurate also the last, number of a little paper was brought to me. A critic announced in a prefatory article that it meant to tell the truth for the first time about the various high-flown false reputations that sprang up in a night. The article went on to say that it meant at last to put men and things in the places God had intended them to occupy.
I This series of the avengers of justice, these literary executions, began with Alexandre Dumas. The article was signed "Lassailly," and had brought him in a hundred francs! The man who brought me the paper was acquainted with what I had done for Lassailly a fortnight before.
"Well," he asked, "what do you say to that?"
"Poor boy!" I replied; "he has perhaps had to bury his mother!"
And I stuffed the journal into the chiffonier drawer from whence he had taken the hundred and thirty francs which he never paid back. Lassailly has since died, and the paper was never resuscitated.
Let us now return to the two Christines. Directly, as I have said, I learnt the failure of Soulié's, I finished mine within a month almost, and it then had the form it now bears. I went, that same day, to find the manager of the Théâtre-Français, whose name I have forgotten. He was a kind of mulatto, with big eyes and yellow skin, and, with the letter of the committee in my hand, M. Brault's Christine having been played, I asked that mine should be put in rehearsal. There was, indeed, to be a committee the next day; and the manager replied that he would lay the matter before them. The committee decided that as it was a matter of common knowledge that I had altered my work, I ought to submit to a second reading. But as this second reading was, in reality, a third reading, I declined the proposal outright. And with this struggle with the Comédie-Française began a lasting series of friendly dealings between us. In the middle of the conflict I received a letter from Harel couched in the following terms:—
"MY DEAR DUMAS,—What do you think of this idea of Mademoiselle Georges? To play your Christine immediately, on the same stage and with the same actors as those who played Soulié's Christine? The conditions to be settled by yourself. You need not trouble your head with the idea that you will strangle a friend's work, because it yesterday died a natural death.—Yours ever, HAREL"
I called my servant, and on the epistle which I have above transcribed I wrote the words—