“It is so bad,” replied the academician, “that, if I had not seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, I could not have believed that the French drama and the French public could have fallen so low. I asked myself whether I was in Paris or in Sodom. From first to last the piece is a tissue of license and blasphemy, for which I could find no parallel, even approximately, in the most ribald productions of ancient or modern literature.”
“Dear me!” exclaimed Berthe, “you quite horrify me. Why, we had just arranged a partie fine to go and see it!”
“Take an old man’s advice, madame—don’t go,” said the academician impressively.
“It all depends,” said the Princess de M——, twirling her parasol, and lolling back in the luxurious fauteuil, “if one is prepared to risk it. I am for my part!”
The philosopher bowed to the lady, but offered no comment.
“Why does the Censure permit such bad comedies to be played?” asked Madame de Beaucœur. “I thought the reason for its existence was the protection of the public morals?”
“Political morals rather, madame,” corrected the Deputy de la Gauche, with an air of mock solemnity, “and it is most conscientious in the discharge of that duty. An irreverent insinuation against the government suffices to bring down anathemas on a comedy or a drama from which no amount of talent can redeem it. My friend Henri —— has just had a chef-d’œuvre, the result of a whole year’s labor, rejected on the plea that some odd passages, which cannot be removed without changing the whole plan, might be construed by sensitive Imperialists into a hit at the dynasty.”
“The judges would serve the dynasty better by exercising a little wholesome restraint over what may prove more fatal to it in the long run than even servile flattery,” observed the philosopher. “What think you, M. le Sénateur?”
“Que voulez-vous?” The senator shrugged his shoulders. “One must reckon with human nature; you cannot lock it in on every side. If you don’t leave a safety-valve to let off the superfluous steam, the ship will blow up.”
“Take care the valve does not turn out to be a leak, or the ship may sink!” replied the academician. “Our press and our literature are eating into the very marrow of the nation’s heart, and rotting it. The people are taught to scoff at everything—to make a jest of everything, human and divine. Nothing is sacred to the venal scribes who pander to the base passions of humanity, and prey upon its vices and its follies. When public morality has come to such a pass that one of the first writers of the day publicly vindicates the devil’s claim to our respect and pity as ‘an unsuccessful revolutionist,’ and when one of the last writes and prints such a sentence as, ‘I grant you the good God, but leave me the devil!’ and that the cynical blasphemy calls out no stronger comment than a laugh or a shrug—when, I say, we have come to this pitch of progress and civilization, it is time the ship’s hold were looked to.”