Once again I repeat it (and these lines are addressed to M. Frédérick Gaillardet), Heaven save me, after the lapse of twenty-one years, from seeming to have hostile intentions towards a man who did me the honour of risking his life against mine, in exchanging pistol shots with me; but I must, according to my accustomed frankness, relate things as they happened, very certain that, if it is still necessary at this date, the memories of Bocage, of Georges, of Janin and of Verteuil will agree with mine. Having made this assertion, I will continue my narrative. When left to myself, I began to read the manuscript. The play began at the second scene, that is to say, with Orsini's monologue. Finally, the second scene, which was then the first, remained pretty much as it was. There was, as Verteuil had told me, and as I myself recognised later, no other difference between M. Gaillardet's MS. and Janin's than the style. Janin, as is known, is, in this respect, a master before whom small fry bow and great ones salute. But a complete tirade, probably the most brilliant in the whole drama, belonged to Janin: it was the one of the grandes dames. Did he avenge himself here on some lady, some one he believed to be a great lady? I do not know at all; but although the tirade is well known, we will reproduce it here.
"BURIDAN. Vous ne savez donc pas où nous sommes?
PHILIPPE. Où sommes-nous?
BURIDAN. Vous ne savez donc pas quelles sont ces femmes?
PHILIPPE. Vous êtes tout ému, Buridan!
BURIDAN. Ces femmes, n'avez-vous pas quelque soupçon de leur rang?... N'avez-vous pas remarqué que ce doivent être de grandes dames?... Avez-vous vu, car je pense qu'il vient de vous arriver, à vous, ce qui vient de m'arriver, à moi,—avez-vous vu, dans vos amours de garnison, beaucoup de mains aussi blanches, beaucoup de sourires aussi froids?... Avez-vous remarqué ces riches habits, ces voix si douces, ces regards si faux? Ce sont de grandes dames voyez-vous!... Elles nous fait chercher dans la nuit par une femme vieille et voilée, qui avait des paroles mielleuses. Oh! ce sont de grandes dames!... A peine sommes nous entrés dans cet endroit éblouissant, parfumé et chaud à enivrer, qu'elles nous accueillis, avec mille tendresses, qu'elles se sont livrées à nous sans détour, sans retard, à nous tout de suite, à nous inconnus et tout mouillés de cet orage. Vous voyez bien que ce sont de grandes dames!... A table,—et c'est notre histoire à tous deux, n'est-ce pas?—à table, elles se sont abandonées à tout ce que l'amour et l'ivresse ont d'emportement et d'oubli; elles ont blasphémé; elles ont tenu d'étranges discours et d'odieuses paroles; elles ont oublié toute retenue, toute pudeur, oublié la terre, oublié le ciel. Ce sont de grandes dames, de très-grandes dames, je vous le répète!"
The first fault which struck me, a theatrical man, in the work, was that the play began really at the second scene, and, consequently, none of the parts were known or the characters properly revealed; so that while reading this tower scene, the tavern scene began to appear to me as in a cloud. But I did not stop short there, it was not a suitable moment. I began the second; but I protest that I did not go further than the eighth or tenth page. The drama completely deviated from the course which, in my opinion, it ought to have taken.
The essential crux of the drama to me was the struggle between Buridan and Margaret of Burgundy, between an adventurer and a queen, the one armed with all the resources of his genius, the other with the powerful allies of her rank. Of course, genius is naturally made to triumph over power. Then I had had an idea in my head for a long time which I thought highly dramatic; and I wanted to try to get that situation put before the public.
A man is arrested, sentenced, and laid in the depths of a dungeon, without resource or hope; a man who will be lost if his enemy has the courage not to come and mock at his abasement, but to have him poisoned, strangled, or stabbed in his corner; the man will be saved if his enemy yields to the desire to come and insult him for the last time; for, with speech, the sole weapon left him, he would frighten his enemy so that the latter would loosen the chains on his arms a little, and the iron collar round his neck, and open to him the door which he had hitherto so carefully closed upon him, and lead forth in triumph the man who expected that, if he ever left his living tomb at all, it would only be to mount the scaffold.
The struggle between Margaret of Burgundy and Buridan gave me the idea for this situation. It will be well understood that I did not let such a scene slip. It is the one that has since been named la scène de la prison. That settled, I did not trouble any further over the rest. I wrote to Harel that I was his man for La Tour de Nesle, and begged him to come and arrange the terms under which this new drama should be done.
I must explain to the public what I mean by settling the terms. I wished—since Janin loyally, more than loyally, generously, withdrew from the collaboration—that M. Gaillardet, who had temporarily given up his share to Janin, should take that share to himself again. At that period, unless under private treaty, author's rights at the theatre Porte-Saint-Martin, for which M. Gaillardet's drama was intended, were 48 francs for author's share and 24 francs' worth of tickets per night. Consequently, 24 francs for author's rights and 12 francs' worth of tickets were conceded to Janin. Janin, as we have said, gave up his share; I wanted this share to be returned to M. Gaillardet, and my rights to be settled independently, as if I had been a complete stranger to the work. I laid down also, as a condition, sine quâ non, that my name should be left. It was agreed in the contract with Janin that his name should be given. Harel raised no difficulties over granting me my separate treaty, which was the same as in Christine: 10 francs per hundred of the takings, and 36 to 40 francs' worth of tickets, I believe. Nothing could be objected to, as the rights were proportional—if it paid, I gained; if it did not, I only made a light demand on the receipts. Now, take careful notice, that, at this time of cholera, two or three hundred francs were quite large takings. The Odéon once played before one spectator who refused to have his money returned, and insisted that they should go through the performance for him and then hissed it. But, by hissing, the wretched man raised a weapon against himself; the manager sent for a police officer, who, with the excuse that the hisser disturbed the performance, put him outside the doors. Harel, I say, made no difficulty of any kind over my separate contract; but he did over my wishing to maintain my incognito: I had a hard struggle over this, and he poured upon me all the dazzling splendours of his wit and the thundering ammunition of his paradoxes. I held out and Harel retired conquered. It was settled and signed that I was to have my separate contract, that I should not be named, that M. Gaillardet should alone be mentioned by name on the night of the first performance and on the bills, and that he alone should take the whole of the rights granted by the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre at the time when he signed his treaty; but, I reserved to myself the right to put the drama under my own name among my complete works. From that moment, Verteuil never left me; he came every morning, and, as much dictated as written by his hand, every night he carried a scene away with him. After the prison scene, Harel rushed in. It was a chef d'œuvre, which would even put the success of Henri III. into the shade. I laughed. I really must let my name be given; it was impossible otherwise. I grew angry, and Harel took himself off in despair. Theatrical managers, in those days, had a singular idea to which, indeed, they have returned latterly: it was that they made more money, with equal merit, when the name of the author was known, than if it were unknown. I think they were mistaken. The better the name be known, the more it rouses jealous feelings on the part of criticism: the less it be known, the more kindly does criticism favour it. Criticism, which does not produce children of its own, only picks up and fondles orphans which it can adopt; but it turns, angry and growling, on those children who are supported by a vigorous parentage. Nowadays, managers have fallen into the opposite abuse. They have hunted out from the collections of proverbs all the pieces which were no good at all—comedies which were not comedies, dramas which were not dramas—and played them with more or less success. The object of this attempt was, I believe, meant at least to prove that dramatic art is an art by itself; a rare and difficult one, seeing that Greece has only bequeathed to us Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes; Rome, only Plautus, Terence and Seneca; England, only Shakespeare and Sheridan; Italy, only Machiavelli and Alfieri; Spain, only Lopes de Vega, Calderon, Alarcon and Tirso de Molina; Germany, only Goethe and Schiller; and France, only Corneille, Rotrou, Molière, Racine, Voltaire and Beaumarchais; that is to say, but twenty-three names floating on an ocean of twenty-three centuries! Actually, this is what happens in my opinion: more noise is made round the work of a known author; people wait for and receive the appearance of such work with greater curiosity; but the public also becomes more exacting in proportion as the reputation of the writer increases: they get tired of hearing a man called happy; as the Athenians grew tired of hearing Aristides called the Just; and reaction operates with a harshness all the stronger as the previous favouritism has been great. Finally, the man who falls, if unknown, only falls from the height of the play by which he has made his début; the known author who falls, on the contrary, falls from the height of all his past successes. I have experienced this in my own case; at three epochs in my life, reaction has disturbed me to the point that, in order to keep the footing I had arrived at, I had to exert greater efforts than those I had made in reaching that stage. We are not far from the first of these epochs, and I will relate this phase of my life with the same simplicity as I have related the rest. After nine days of work, which retarded my convalescence by more than a month, Verteuil carried away the last scenes of the drama, with the following letter addressed to Harel:—
"DEAR FRIEND,—Do not be distressed at these two last scenes. They are weak, I grant; when I got to the end, my strength failed me. Look upon them as null and void, as they will have to be rewritten. But give me two or three days' rest, and don't be uneasy. I begin to be of your opinion: there are the elements of a tremendous success in the work.—Yours always,
"ALEX. DUMAS"
After the fourth act, the poorest in the whole work, Harel had written to me—