"My dear fellow," Georges had said to me, "remember this: a genius like Frédéric can play any part well."
The reason struck me as being so good that I gave in, and the part was given to Frédéric.
By the ninth day the piece was copied out; Verteuil, with the assistance of two copyists, had only taken one day longer to copy it out than I had to write it.
It was not good work, far from it; but the title would assure a popular success, and the part of the spy would be enough to secure literary success.
They assembled on the ninth day to hear it read, and I read as far as Moscow; next day I continued to the end. The part of Frédéric alone contained four thousand lines—that is to say, it was as long as all the parts in Le Mariage de Figaro put together. But to cut nothing out of it during collation seemed impossible, and it was therefore decided that any cutting down should be done at rehearsals. Everybody set to work with an energy I have rarely seen, even learning passages that were likely to be omitted, which is a most difficult thing to get an artist to do. Frédéric, Lockroy and Stockleit were enraptured with their parts. I was set at liberty the night of the reading. There was a supper given me on my release, as there had been before my incarceration.
These suppers at Georges' house were delightful; I reiterate this statement, for they are amongst my happiest memories of the past; no one could possibly have been more beautiful and queenly, more scornful and caustic, more like a Greek courtezan, or a Roman matron, or the niece of a pope, than was Georges (in her varying moods). The contrast between Georges and Mars was incredibly great; Mars was always as affected, reserved, tight-laced and self-contained as the wife of a senator of the Empire. And then there was Harel, who was so alert mentally that he always reminded one of a man sitting on a glass stool in touch with an electric battery, with sparks at all his finger-tips, and at the end of each of his hairs.
When it came to the actual theatre, it was found to contain over a hundred different parts. For five or six days there was a perfect chaos to unravel; I believe I would rather have put the world to rights as described in the Book of Genesis than this world of Napoléon. All the parts melted down, compressed and put together (not including the supernumeraries), made between eighty and ninety persons with speaking parts. Jouslin de la Salle, stage manager, quite lost his head over it, and Harel emptied three snuff-boxes full at every rehearsal.
As we have said, Harel laid out a hundred thousand francs in the mounting of the play; but not even M. de Rothschild's cashier would have been capable of calculating the number of brilliant, sparkling, comic expressions he also expended.
In the midst of all this hurly-burly I followed up that everlasting study of dramatic situations and of character which I am looking for always and everywhere, sometimes even in places where they don't exist. Here is an example, for instance:—
Amongst my troop-leaders, acting in—I know not now what part—one of those small rôles called accessoires (emergency parts), I had noticed a good-looking young man of between twenty-five and twenty-six years of age, holding a gun as though he had never done anything else all his life long, and, what was still more unusual and important, speaking his part fairly well.