[3] The game of draughts (les dames)—it is the game that is meant—is in fact this actor's ruling passion, although he is not a first-rate player. He knows, however, how to reconcile that passion with his duties, and is scarcely less eager to quit his game in order to go upon the stage when it is a public performance that is in question, than to quit the stage to resume his game; when merely authors are concerned, it is true, he does not exercise so much alacrity; but as it is only a matter of rehearsals, does he not always arrive quite soon enough ... when he does come?
[4] The seat of memory varies according to the individual. It lay in the stomach of that comedian to whom Voltaire sent his Variantes in a pâté. Mademoiselle Contat placed it in her heart, and her memory was an excellent one.
[5] In consequence of this right, M. Firmin is preparing to play Hamlet. He has even bought for it, they tell me, the dress Talma wore in that part. Fancy his dreaming of such a thing. That costume was not made for his figure, and besides, all who wear lions' skins are not always taken for lions.
[6] Louis XI. and Émilia, whose merits we fully appreciate, seem indeed to have been borrowed, if not actually robbed, from the theatres of the boulevards. If, during the performance of these pieces, the orchestra perchance woke out of its lethargy, whether to announce by a fanfare of trumpets the entrance or departure of exalted personages, whether to explain by a short symphony what speech had failed to make clear, and even when one was in the precincts consecrated to Racine, Corneille and Voltaire, one was willing enough to fancy oneself at the Ambigu-Comique or at the Gaieté: it needed nothing more than this to complete the illusion. Let us hope that the regenerators of this theatre will take kindly to the remark and will profit by it for the perfecting of the French stage.
[7] For the last six months, and even to-day, the bill announces: "Until the performance of Les Guelfes et Les Gibelins"; probably to-morrow it will no longer contain the announcement.
[8] It is especially against tragedies in verse that the umpires of good taste to-day protest. Their repugnance in respect of poetry ever outweighs their love for romanticism. If, in that series of chapters—entitled scenes—whose whole forms a novel called a drama, which is sold under the title of Louis XI.; if, in Louis XI., the Scottish prose of Sir Walter Scott had been put into rhymed verse; that drama would not have been more kindly received by them than a posthumous tragedy of Racine, although common sense would be scarcely more respected there than in a melodrama. It is to the absence of rhyme also that Émilia owes the favour with which these gentlemen have honoured it. When he had heard the reading of that work, one of the most influential members of the tribunal by which it had been judged, exclaimed: "The problem is solved! The problem is solved! We have at last a tragedy in prose!" The Comédiens Français formerly gave a hundred louis to Thomas Corneille for putting a comedy of Molière's, Le Festin de Pierre, into verse. The Comédiens Français will, it is said, to-day give a thousand louis to an academician for putting the tragedies of Corneille, Racine and of Voltaire into prose. Is it indeed necessary that they should address themselves to an academician for that? Do not a good many of them perform that parody every day of their lives?
Verse and rhyme are not natural, say lovers of nature. Clothes, gentlemen, are not natural, and yet you wear them to distinguish yourself from the savage; furthermore, you wear clothes of fine materials to distinguish yourselves from the rabble, and, when you are rich enough to enable you to do so, you adorn them with trimmings to distinguish yourself even from well-to-do people. That which one does for the body permit us to do for the intellect; allow us to do for the mind that which you do for matter.