As to those who would turn into accusation the hisses of Versailles, they should recollect that more than one chef-d'oeuvre, hissed at Paris, has been raised again by the suffrages of Versailles;--"Les Plaideurs" of Racine, for instance, which the court restored to the poet with extraordinary applause, with the bursting laughter of Louis XIV., which come deliciously to trouble the repose of Racine, at five o'clock in the morning. Happy times, on the contrary, when poets had, to approve them, to try them, this double jurisdiction; when they could appeal from the censures of the court to the praises of the town, from the hisses of Versailles to the plaudits of Paris! Now we behold René le Sage, to whom nothing opposes: he has divined his true vocation, which is comedy; he understands what may be made of the human race, and by what light threads are suspended the human heart. These threads of gold, of silver, or of brass, he holds them at this moment in his hand, and you will see with what skill he weaves them. Already in his head, which bears Gil Blas and his fortune, ferment the most charming recitals of "Le Diable Boiteux." Silence! "Turcaret" is about to appear,--Turcaret, whom Molière would not have forgotten if Turcaret had lived in his day; but it was necessary to wait till France should have escaped from the reign, so decorous, of Louis XIV., to witness the coming, after the man of the Church, after the man of the sword, this man without heart and without mind,--the man of money. In a society like our own, the man of money is one of those bastard and insolent powers which grow out of the affairs of every day, as the mushroom grows out from the dunghill. We know not whence comes this inert force,--we know not how it is maintained on the surface of the world, and nothing tells how it disappears, after having thrown its phosphorus of an instant. It is necessary, in truth, that an epoch should be sufficiently corrupt, and sufficiently stained with infamy, when it replaces, by money, the sword of the warrior, by money the sentence of the judge, by money the intelligence of the legislator, by money the sceptre of the king himself. Once that a nation has descended so low, as to adore money on its knees--to require neither fine arts, nor poesy, nor love, it is debased as was the Jewish people, when it knelt before the golden calf. Happily, of all the ephemeral powers in the world, money is the most ephemeral; we extend to it our right hand, it is true, but we buffet it with our left; we prostrate ourselves before it as it passes along,--yes; but when it has passed, we kick it with our foot! This is what Le Sage marvellously comprehended, like a great comic poet as he was. He found the absurd and frightful side of those gilded men who divide our finances, menials enriched overnight, who, more than once, by a perfectly natural mistake, have mounted behind their own coaches. And such is Turcaret. The poet has loaded him