I was present at this extraordinary _séance_, and, although the Marquis Costa de Beauregard is an academician whom posterity may in all safety be reckoned on to ignore, it was impossible to withhold cordial recognition of the justice and good taste of his sharp retort to the inexcusable offender. Meilhac, whose empty chair M. Lavedan was elected to fill, may or may not have been as black as his appointed eulogist painted him, but the Academy was not the place to attack this character, and the occasion chosen by M. Lavedan was as indelicate as if he had selected a man’s open grave, with mourning relatives and friends around, for disrespectful usage of his name. Stupefied, as was everyone else by this singular proceeding, I questioned a friend whose privilege it is to wear the palm-embroidered coat and mother-of-pearl sword, and was told that this was M. Lavedan’s way of avenging the disapproval of the Academy of his _Vieux Marcheur_, played only after his election. These nervous elderly gentlemen, unacquainted with the literature of their new colleague, were desperately alarmed when they were made aware of the nature of this popular and shocking play. The sensations of the hen affrighted on the edge of a pool where her duckling is disporting were nothing to theirs; and so the author, at bay, took his revenge by endeavouring, with more talent than taste, to prove to them that, if they did not relish the _Vieux Marcheur_ (something in the style of “sad old rake”) out of their doors, they could be extremely indulgent to the same type of gentleman within those sacred precincts. At a more recent election, that of M. Paul Hervieu, M. Brunetière, reversing the order of contumely, was nothing loath to poke blame at the newly received Immortal because of his social cynicism and the unkind pictures M. Hervieu has drawn of the world of men and women M. Brunetière delights to honour. But we need not penetrate beneath the surface to explain such an inhospitable fashion of receiving a candidate into this classical club. M. Brunetière, the discoverer of Bossuet, is a fervent reactionary. The Church, the Army, Society,—behold his gods!—with the result that, in the deadly conflict waged for two years round an unfortunate Jew, M. Brunetière went with the unjust majority, while M. Hervieu, the author of that dramatic and brilliant thesis on Feminism, _La Loi de l’Homme_, went with the just and liberal minority. It needed nothing more to give him over as a meal to the omnivorous editor of the _Revue des deux Mondes_, whose virtuous indignation against M. Hervieu’s generous cry for justice to women knew no bounds.