"Good!" I said. "The play will be finished when I say it is finished.... It is Harel who is in a hurry, not I ..."
"Harel will wait," said Georges in her grand Cleopatra and Medea style.
I bowed; I had nothing further to say.
Harel pointed out a toilet table and its fittings, and observed that my room had no other means of access than through that belonging to Georges; then he went away with her and shut me in. They had even gone so far as to send to my rooms for my trousers. That same night, or rather morning, I set to work and thought out the part of the spy, and the way to divide up the drama. When the rôle of the spy was thought out, the rest was clear enough. History itself provided the divisions of the play.
"From Toulon to Sainte-Hélène!" Harel had said to me. "I am willing to lay out a hundred thousand francs, if need be!"
It would have been difficult to provide me with a wider margin.
The next morning I began to write. As fast as the scenes were composed I passed them over to Georges, who in her turn sent them on to Harel, who in his gave them to a charming fellow called Verteuil to copy out. Verteuil is now secretary to the Théâtre-Français.
The drama was done at the end of the week. It consisted of twenty-four scenes and contained nine thousand lines. It was three times bigger than an ordinary play, five times longer than Iphigénie and six times longer than Mérope.
Frédéric was to play the part of Napoléon. I had debated that choice beforehand; physique seemed to me to be most important in such a creation. The success of the Napoléon at the Porte-Saint-Martin was due primarily to Gobert's likeness to the emperor; and nobody could have been less like Napoléon and especially Bonaparte, than Frédéric.