As the play developed, it assumed great proportions, and I began to believe, with Harel, that it would be a big success. The parts of Marguerite and of Buridan were just made for Georges and for Bocage, who were both splendid in them. Lockroy, who, out of friendship for me, played the part of Gaultier d'Aulnay, was deliciously youthful and loverlike and poetic in it; Provost (as Savoisy), Serres (as Landry) and Delafosse (as Philippe d'Aulnay) completed the characters.
The day of the first performance came: 29 May 1832; I had sent a box ticket to Odilon Barrot, telling him I would dine with him, and reserving a place for myself in his box. The dinner lasted longer than we expected; Madame Odilon Barrot, then young and charming, always a clever and original woman—a rare thing among women—was upon thorns. The great demagogue had no notion anybody could feel so much impatience to see a first performance of a play. We arrived in the middle of the second scene, just in time to hear the tirade of the grandes dames. The theatre was in a state of boiling excitement: the audience felt the success of the play, it was in the air, they breathed it. The end of the second scene is terrible in its impressiveness: Buridan leaping from the window into the Seine, Marguerite revealing her bleeding cheek, and exclaiming—" 'Look at thy face and then die,' saidest thou? Let it be done as thou wishest.... Look, and die!" This was all startling and terrible! And, when, after the orgy, the flight, the assassination, the laughter extinguished in groans, the man flung into the river, the lover of a night pitilessly murdered by his royal mistress, the careless and monotonous voice of the night watchman is heard calling, "Three o'clock and a quiet night: Parisians sleep!" the audience burst forth into loud applause.
The third scene is poor, I must candidly admit; it was nearly all written by me, and it was a bit of gagging; still, it does not allow interest to languish; the second had sated the spectators for a time. It will be recollected that, except for an alteration in the staging, the second scene was almost entirely the same as in M. Gaillardet's manuscript. The end of the third scene, however, relieves the beginning; the last scene was entirely concerned with Gaultier d'Aulnay, who comes to demand vengeance for the murder of his brother from Marguerite of Bourgogne, without knowing that the murder had been committed by her. Lockroy's exhibition of grief was magnificent.
The fourth scene was scarcely better than the third; it was the one where Buridan and Marguerite meet in the Orsini tavern, where Marguerite tears from the diary entrusted to her lover the famous page which proves the murder. The principal scene was an improbable one; I had tried my hand at it three or four times before I succeeded. Let me add that I have never been satisfied with it; Georges, who, for her part too, felt it was false, did not play it so well as the others. But the audience was captivated, and in that frame of mind which accepts everything.
The fifth scene was short, spirited, sensitive and full of surprises. The arrest and exit of Buridan made the greatest sensation. Finally, came the famous prison act.
One day, my son asked me—he had not yet written plays at that time—
"What are the first principles of a drama?"
"That the first act be lucid, the last short and, above all, that there be no prison scene in the third!"
When I said that I was ungrateful: I have never seen such an effect as that prison act, and it was marvellously played, besides, by the two actors concerned with it, Who have the whole responsibility of it. Serres (Landry) was delightfully artless and whimsical in it. Bocage, with his great Sicilian eyes, his teeth as white as pearls, and his black beard, was of a physical beauty to which, perhaps, I have only seen one other man attain: Mélingue, one of the most beautiful actors I ever saw on the stage.