Never have I seen such children as the Duc de Quiche's. Uniting to the most remarkable personal beauty an intelligence and docility as rare as they are delightful; and never did I witness any thing like the unceasing care and attention bestowed on their education by their parents.
Those who only know the Duc and Duchesse in the gay circles, in which they are universally esteemed among the brightest ornaments, can form little idea of them in the privacy of their domestic one—emulating each other in their devotion to their children, and giving only the most judicious proofs of their attachment to them. No wonder that the worthy Duc de Gramont doats on his grandchildren, and never seems so happy as with his excellent son and daughter-in-law.
Went to the Vaudeville Théâtre last evening, to see the new piece by Scribe, so much talked of, entitled Avant, Pendant, et Aprés. There is a fearful vraisemblance in some of the scenes with all that one has read or pictured to oneself, as daily occurring during the terrible days of the Revolution; and the tendency of the production is not, in my opinion, calculated to produce salutary effects. I only wonder it is permitted to be acted.
The piece is divided, as the title announces, into three different epochs. The first represents the frivolity and vices attributed to the days of l'ancien régime, and the tableau des moeurs, which is vividly coloured, leaves no favourable impression in the minds of the audience of that noblesse whose sufferings subsequently expiated the errors said to have accelerated, if not to have produced, the Revolution.
Nothing is omitted that could cast odium on them, as a preparation for the Reign of Terror that follows. The anarchy and confusion of the second epoch—the fear and horror that prevail when the voices and motions of a sanguinary mob are heard in the streets, and the terrified inmates of the houses are seen crouching in speechless terror, are displayed with wonderful truth.
The lesson is an awful, and I think a dangerous, one, and so seemed to think many of the upper class among the audience, for I saw some fair cheeks turn pale, and some furrowed brows look ominous, as the scene was enacted, while those of the less elevated in rank among the spectators assumed, or seemed to assume, a certain fierté, if not ferocity, of aspect, at beholding this vivid representation of the triumph achieved by their order over the noblesse.
It is not wise to exhibit to a people, and above all to so inflammable a people as the French, what they can effect; and I confess I felt uneasy when I witnessed the deep interest and satisfaction evinced by many in the parterre during the representation.
The Après, the third epoch, is even more calculated to encourage revolutionary principles, for in it was displayed the elevation to the highest grades in the army and in the state of those who in the ancien régime would have remained as the Revolution found them, in the most obscure stations, but who by that event had brilliant opportunities afforded for distinguishing themselves.
Heroic courage, boundless generosity, and devoted patriotism, are liberally bestowed on the actors who figure in this last portion of the drama; and, as these qualities are known to have appertained to many of those who really filled the rôles enacted at the period now represented, the scene had, as might be expected, a powerful effect on a people so impressible as the French, and so liable to be hurried into enthusiasm by aught that appeals to their imaginations.
The applause was deafening; and I venture to say, that those from whom it proceeded left the theatre with a conviction that a revolution was a certain means of achieving glory and fortune to those who, with all the self-imagined qualities to merit both, had not been born to either.