Although easy and affable in his intercourse with his friends, a certain jealous vigilance with regard to the respect due to his rank formed a feature in the character of the Duke of Orleans. The anecdote told to Mr Stahr by Dumas, as an illustration of this trait, can hardly, however, be admitted to prove undue susceptibility, but rather the prince's consciousness that his house stood upon an unstable foundation. It was at a hunting-party at Fontainebleau. The chase was very unsuccessful. The Duke of Orleans turned to an Italian nobleman, to whose family Louis Philippe had obligations of ancient date, and who on that account was on a friendly footing at court. "Well! Monsieur de—," said the duke, "how are we hunting to-day?" "Like pigs, Monseigneur, (comme les cochons,)" was the Italian's coarse reply. The duke, evidently annoyed, said to Dumas: "And you believe our monarchy possible, when a De ... dares thus to answer the heir to the throne?" Mr Stahr was interested to find that Dumas, notwithstanding his monarchical friendships and associations, believed in the necessity and durability of the republic. "It seems," said the ingenious and versatile author of Monte Christo, "as if Providence had resolved to let us try all manner of monarchies, in order to convince us that not one of them is adapted to our character and condition." Then he gave his auditors a detailed sketch of all the French monarchies previous to the Revolution of 1789. "Since that Revolution," he went on, "we have had the monarchy of Genius: it lasted ten years. We have had the restoration of the monarchy of esprit and chivalrous gallantry: it lasted fifteen years; and was succeeded by the citizen-monarchy, which lasted eighteen. What would you have us try now? This republic is bad. But a child in swaddling-clothes matures into a man." Sensibly enough spoken for a romance-writer, indulgently remarks Mr Stahr, who is always glad to obtain a suffrage in favour of republican institutions. We attach the same degree of value to M. Dumas's political vaticinations as to his Frenchified rifaccimenti of Shakspeare's plays. Shakspeare in French, as Mr Ford remarks in his Spanish Handbook, "is like Niagara passed through a jelly-bag." A miracle of degradation which reminds us to turn to a scornful and indignant chapter suggested to Mr Stahr by a certain Monsieur Michel Carré's version of Goethe's Faust, performed at the Gymnase theatre. "Goethe is unknown in France," says the Countess d'Agoult, one of the few competent French appreciators of German literature, in her Esquisses Morales et Politiques. Nothing, according to Mr Stahr, could be better fitted to confirm and perpetuate French ignorance of the great German than such dramas as that which he painfully endured at the Gymnase. According to Madame d'Agoult, her countrymen will not take the trouble to study Goethe. To do so they must first learn a language. "Why did he not write in French? He has only what he deserves, after all. How is it possible to be a German?—(comment est on Allemand?)" "If this is not exactly out-spoken," says Madame d'Agoult, "it is at least privately thought in a country where the arrogance of ignorance attains proportions unknown to other nations." "La superbe de l'ignorance," "der Uebermuth der Unwissenheit!" cries Mr Stahr in an ecstasy: "I kiss the fair lady's hand who wrote the word, for, without it, I should never have hit upon the appropriate term for this newest French atrocity of M. Michel Carré, perpetrated upon the most profound work of German genius. I am not without experience of the theatrical sufferings of our day; but such torture as was yesterday inflicted, at the Gymnase theatre, upon every German fibre in our frames, I never before in my whole life witnessed or underwent. I was prepared for little that was good, and for much that was laughable; but my expectations and fears were surpassed to an extent it was impossible to anticipate. Marsyas flayed by Apollo is no very pleasing picture, but the Belvidere Apollo flayed by a Marsyas is a spectacle which it takes all the nerve of German critical observation to endure." Mr Stahr then proceeds to dissect the drama, act by act, and almost scene by scene, with considerable acuteness and humour. The specimens of fustian he gives, the execrable French taste he exposes, fully justify the intensity of his disgust. The Gymnase drama is evidently worse than a tame translation; it is an obscene parody of Goethe's great poem. It is a compound, as Mr Stahr expresses it, of "dirt and fire—that sort of fire, namely, which is lighted by the brandy-bottle." We believe it impossible that Faust should ever be done justice to in a French version. But if translators, owing to the want of power of the French language, and to the utter absence of affinity and sympathy between it and the German, must ever fall to a certain extent, they at least may avoid degrading and distorting the tone and sentiments of the original. This M. Carré, of whom we now hear for the first time, seems to have cultivated his taste and sought his inspirations in the worst school of modern French literature, and in the orgies of Parisian rakes. The inference is inevitable from the scenes and passages described and quoted by Mr Stahr. As to the verbal spirit and fidelity of the translation, the following may serve as a specimen. "In the church-going scene, the lines, so charming in the original:— 'Mein schónes Fräulein, darf ich wagen,
Arm und Geleite anzutragen?'
are thus rendered in M. Carré's French: Oserai-je, Mademoiselle, vous offrir mon bras, pour vous conduire jusqu'à chez vous? For Gretchen's exquisitely graceful and saucy reply— 'Bin weder Fräulein, weder schön,
Kann ungeleitet nach Hause gehn!'
which so completely captivates Goethe's Faust, this Frenchman has been able to discover no better equivalent than, 'Pardon, Monsieur, je puis fort bien rentrer seule à la maison'—an answer too flat and insipid even for a Paris Lorette of the present day." Mr Stahr was tolerably well pleased with the bearing of the audience who had come to partake of this pitiable French hash. They may have felt a natural curiosity to know something about the Faust and Margaret whose acquaintance they had made in the print-shop windows, but their sympathy with the piece went no farther. Even the Rose of the Gymnase, the Rose Chéri, so cherished by the Parisian public, failed to extract applause as M. Carré's Margaret. "It is very romantic," Mr Stahr heard some of his neighbours remark, "but it is a little too German; Monsieur Goethe's poetry does not suit the French taste." Poor public! Poor Goethe! introduced to each other under such dismal auspices. It must have been a relief to Mr Stahr to quit this miserable travesty, and turn to the native drama; although even by this, judging from a letter on theatrical subjects addressed to his friend Julius Mosen, he does not appear to have been much gratified. "I know not," he says, "whether my taste for theatres is gone by, or what is the reason, but as yet I have been scarcely half-a-dozen times to the play. Beginning with the Théatre Français, I might place as a motto at the beginning of this letter the words of Courier: 'The fact is that the Théatre Français, and all the old theatres of Paris, the Opera included, are excessively wearisome.' To be sure, Rachel is not here. She is gathering laurels in Germany; and when I complained confidentially to an acquaintance that the tragedy of the Théatre Français did not move me, he endeavoured to console me by telling me of Madlle. Rachel, and of her speedy return to Paris. She stands alone, incomparable, a phenomenon. But the phenomenon is absent; and the Paris stage is consequently darkened. It is always a bad sign for the condition of an art when it thus entirely depends upon one of its professors." Mr Stahr was better pleased with the lively performances at the four Vaudeville theatres, and gives an amusing analysis of La Fille bien gardée, the little one-act piece which, for many weeks of last year, nightly drew crowds to the Théatre Montansier. It belongs to a class of dramatic trifles in which French playwrights and actors are perfect and inimitable; trifles which only grow upon French soil, and will not bear transplanting.
After his savage attacks upon Louis Philippe and the French President, it would be quite out of character if Mr Stahr—who evidently bears monarchy a grudge, and will tolerate no government that can possibly be identified with the cause of order—had not a fling at Henri Cinq. Perhaps it is because he deems the Legitimist interest less formidable to his views than the Orleanist or Buonapartist, that he adopts a different mode of attack, and exchanges ferocity for raillery. The German tongue being but indifferently adapted to the lighter manner of warfare, he glides into French, in which language he writes nearly a whole chapter. Stepping one day into a hair-dresser's rooms, he was so fortunate as to come under the hands of the master of the establishment, an eager politician and a red-hot Legitimist, voluble and communicative as only a Frenchman and a barber can be. With the very first clip of the scissors an animated conversation began, which Mr Stahr has set down so far as his memory serves him, although he much doubts that his pen has conveyed all the minuter comical touches of the dialogue. This began with the usual exordium of Frenchmen of all classes since the revolution—"You, Monsieur," said the man of wigs, "are a foreigner, and consequently uninterested in our quarrels. Tell me what you think of our situation?"
"I think," replied I, "that the President will never willingly resign power."
"But, Monsieur, what is to be hoped for from such an imbécile?"
"I do not say he will succeed; I say he will make the attempt."
"And I say that he will fail. Henry the Fifth for me! à la bonne heure! There is a man for you."
"What do you know about him? You are very anxious, then, to make tonsures?"
"What do I know about him? But, Monsieur, I have seen him, I am acquainted with him, I have spoken to him, and I tell you he is a charming man!"
"Where did you see him?"
"Did I not go to see him at Wiesbaden! Sir, there were thirty-nine of us—workmen, we called ourselves, though we were all masters—who went of our own accord to pay our respects to Henry V. The thing was briskly done, I beg you to believe. I spoke to him as I speak to you, sir, at this moment. At first I was received by M. de la Ferronnaye, his aide-de-camp. 'Good morning, Monsieur R.,' said he, 'how do you do?'—'Very well, sir, I thank you,' answered I; and far from making me wait whole hours at the door, like those republicans of the Veille, he made me sit down beside him on the sofa, as affable as could be."