“‘You may go,’ he says to the officer. ‘I will keep this woman. She shall have a palace.’ “It was in this way that Peter the Great met for the first time the woman who afterwards became Catharine of Russia.... “And now tell me, what do you think of my prologue?” “Very curious, very original; but the rest of it?” “That you shall have in a little while; in the mean time, I am planning an entirely novel mise-en-scène. Russia is for our theatres, and especially for yours, an unexplored and fecund mine. We will be the first to introduce it.” Balzac left me in a state of great enthusiasm, and I built mountains of hopes on the inevitable success of “Pierre et Catharine.” When I saw him again, however, everything had changed. He had given up the Russian drama for the moment, but promised to complete it later on. He had, he said, thought it over. It was a colossal undertaking, in which nothing should be neglected; and as the details concerning certain ceremonies were wanting, he proposed to take a trip to Moscow during the winter, and study the subject on the ground itself. He begged me, therefore, not to insist upon its immediate production, and offered another play in the place of the one thus postponed. In spite of my disappointment, I could, of course, do nothing but submit, and in sheer despair I asked him to tell me something of his new piece. “It will be horrible,” Balzac contentedly replied. “How, horrible?” “Understand me: it is not a question of a heavy melodrama, in which the villain burns the house down, and runs the inmates through and through,—not at all. My play is to be a simple comedy, in which everything is calm, tranquil, and pleasing. The men play placidly at whist, the women laugh and chat over their worsted work, everything announces harmony and order; but beneath this calm surface passions are at work, and the drama ferments, till at last it bursts forth like the flame of a conflagration.” “You are in your element, sir. Then your plot is found?”