"That it is a most able and abominable production, eminently calculated to cause exactly the evils which we have this night perceived--to excite and rouse the worst passions of the mob, and render the masses dissatisfied with their inevitable and irredeemable lot, and as dangerous as wild beasts to all whose lot is more favored." "Man has rights as man, and men in masses have rights, and one of those rights is to know actually what those rights are," said Beauchamp. "The most melancholy feature in the oppression of man is his ignorance that he is oppressed. Enlighten him as to those rights, elevate his mind to appreciate and value them, and then counsel him firmly and resolutely to demand those rights, and quietly and wisely to obtain them." "Aye! but will he obey such counsel?" exclaimed Chateau-Renaud. "Will not the result of such enlightenment and excitement prove, as it ever has proved, anarchy, revolution, guilt, blood? Who shall restrain the monster once lashed into madness?" "But you can surely perceive no such design in this play, and no such effect," rejoined Beauchamp. "In the abstract," replied the Count, "this production is unexceptionable--most beautiful, yet most powerful. How it could have been the work of an unpracticed pen, embodying as it does passages of which the first dramatists of the romantic school might be proud, I cannot imagine. Besides, there seems familiar acquaintance with stage effect and the way in which it is produced. But that might have been, and probably was, the result of some professional player's suggestions." "And, then, the profound knowledge of the human heart evinced--its passions, motives and principles of action," added the journalist. "There seems an individuality, a personality in the production, which compels the idea that the author is himself the hero, that he has himself experienced the evils he so vividly portrays, that the drama is at once the effusion of his own heart and the embodiment of his own history. Can that man be M. Dantes?" "If it be he," cried the Secretary, "there is more reason than ever to call him the most dangerous man in Paris. What with his speeches in the Chamber and his plays at the theatre, all tending to one most unrighteous end, and all aiming to inflame such an explosive mass as the workmen of Paris, he may be regarded as little less than the very agent of the fiend to accomplish havoc on earth!"