The last time I visited those haunts of my childhood, I heard that "little Marie" was the mamma of eight children. God bless that mamma and her dear little brood!
At fifteen I was passionately fond of music, and declared to my father that I had made up my mind to be an artiste.
My father was a man of great common sense and few words: he administered to me a sound thrashing, which had the desired effect of restoring my attentions to Cicero and Thucydides.
It did not, however, altogether cure me of a certain yearning after literary glory.
For many months I devoted the leisure, left me by Greek version and Latin verse, to the production of a drama in five acts and twelve tableaux.
For that matter I was no exception to the rule. Every French school-boy has written, is writing, or will write a play.
My drama was a highly moral one of the sensational class. Blood-curdling, horrible, terrible, savage, weird, human, fiendish, fascinating, irresistible—it was all that. I showed how, even in this world, crime, treachery, and falsehood, though triumphant for a time, must in the long run have their day of reckoning. Never did a modern Drury Lane audience see virtue more triumphant and vice more utterly confounded than the Parisians would have in my play, if only the theatrical directors had not been so stupid as to refuse my chef-d'œuvre.
For it was refused, inconceivable as it seemed to me at the time.