"Saltabadil is to give up the body at midnight. The king, half drunk, is at his house, defenceless and laid down, and it is a quarter to twelve. Maguelonne begs her brother to spare so good looking a young fellow. The brigand refuses, for he is an honest brigand and conducts his trade conscientiously; only, he desires that some one else should appear so that he may kill him and deliver him up in place of the other. Blanche has returned and hears everything; she has been seduced by the king; she does not love him, for he consorts with the most degraded of women. But Blanche will die for him! This is a devotion on the part of a young girl which no one but M. Victor Hugo would have conceived possible. ..."
Why so? Do you mean to say that Victor Hugo is the only one who has a large enough heart to understand such devotion? Then it seems to me that the blame turns singularly into praise.
"Blanche knocks at the door, goes in ... and the curtain falls. Why does not M. Hugo show us the assassination? What is one horror more? In the fifth act, Triboulet comes in front of the pothouse. It is a stormy night; midnight strikes. The brigand then opens his door and drags a sack along the ground containing a dead body. He receives the remainder of the twenty crowns and shuts his door. Triboulet puts his foot on the body, saying—
'Ceci, c'est un buffon! et ceci, c'est un roi!'
Then he raves over the body and curses it, and struts about and prates of glory, of revolutions and of crowns, and returns to the body and addresses these extraordinary lines to it—
'M'entends tu? m'entends-tu? m'entends-tu? m'entends-tu ...'"
It would, indeed, be very extraordinary if it were thus, but, unfortunately, there is no such line. This is the real line, or, rather these are the lines—
"Je te hais, m'entends-tu? c'est moi, roi gentilhomme;
Moi, ce fou, ce bouffon; moi, cette moitié d'homme,
Cet animal douteux à qui tu disais: 'Chien!'
C'est que, quand la vengeance est en nous, vois-tu bien,
Dans le cœur le plus mort, il n'est plus rien qui dorme;
Le plus chétif grandit, le plus vil se transforme,
L'esclave tirs alors sa haine du fourreau,
Et le chat devient tigre, et le bouffon bourreau!'"
Far enough, you will agree, from the line invented by the critic—
"M'entends-tu? m'entends-tu? m'entends-tu? m'entends-tu?"
"Finally," continues our Aristarchus, "after an interminable monologue" (certainly interminable if you have understood all the lines in the same fashion as the one you have quoted, but which, were you a poet, monsieur critic, would seem short to you!),[4] "Triboulet drags the body to him and is going to fling it into the Seine, when a cavalier comes out of the tavern and disappears along the quay. Triboulet has recognised the king; then he tears open the sack, and, by the light of a torch, he recognises his daughter! He calls for help, and torches are brought! Blanche still breathes; they fetch a doctor, but she dies immediately he arrives, and Triboulet falls dead the same instant.
"Such is this monstrous play, in which history is set at naught, the manners of the times misconstrued, the characters of François I. and of Clément Marot dishonoured and reviled, wherein hardly any beautiful lines shine to redeem the emptiness of the conception, the absence of clever conduct, the absolute want of interest: where, in short, the horrible and ignoble and immoral are all mixed up together in a chaotic confusion."
Well, monsieur critic, are you satisfied? Are you being well avenged at the expense of the man of genius? Have you trodden his dramas sufficiently under foot, as Triboulet trod on the corpse of the person he thought his enemy? No! You begin your monologue again. Ah! it seems short to you, does it not? because it is one of hatred.[5] Proceed then! the hatred of the petty for the great is not groundless, and at all times, as Triboulet shows us with regard to the king, and as you exhibit with regard to the drama, such hatred ever yearns to slay.