Although great events were gathering like a dreadful storm on the horizon, and were about to take place in the midst of the miserable controversy about which we are writing, I think it is better, as we have begun it, to follow it to the end, rather than to return to it later.
M. Gaillardet persisted in his lawsuit and won it. I have mentioned that I had completely refused to second Harel in his defence. The ill-advised stars which had stolen a march upon M. Gaillardet's name were obliged to fall behind it; but, as Harel had wished, all Paris knew that I was the real author of La Tour de Nesle.
Did this do the drama much good? I have my doubts about it; I have already expressed my opinion upon the pleasure the public takes in making the reputation of an unknown young man at the expense of established reputations. Two years went by, during which La Tour de Nesle ran its two to three hundred performances. I thought no more about the old quarrel; I had only published Gaule et France during those two years—a very incomplete work, from the point of view of science, but singularly noteworthy from the point of view of the prediction with which it ends—and had Angèle performed, when, one morning, a friend of mine (friends are very useful sometimes, as we are about to see), came into my room when I was still in bed, and, after a few preliminary words, asked me if I had read Le Musée des Familles. I looked at him with an obviously astonished air.
"Le Musée des Familles?" I asked. "On what grounds should I have read that paper?"
"Because it contains an article by M. Gaillardet."
"So much the better for Le Musée des Familles."
"An article on La Tour de Nesle."
"Ah! an article on the drama?"
"No, on the tower."