"There's a time for everything," said Sylvain Kohn chaffingly. "You wanted virtue. You see, there's still virtue in France." "But that's not virtue!" cried Christophe. "That's rhetoric!" "In France," said Sylvain Kohn. "Virtue in the theater is always rhetorical." "A pretorium virtue," said Christophe, "and the prize goes to the best talker. I hate lawyers. Have you no poets in France?" Sylvain Kohn took him to the poetic drama. * * * * * There were poets in France. There were even great poets. But the theater was not for them. It was for the versifiers. The theater is to poetry what the opera is to music. As Berlioz said: _Sicut amori lupanar._ Christophe saw Princesses who were virtuously promiscuous, who prostituted themselves for their honor, who were compared with Christ ascending Calvary:--friends who deceived their friends out of devotion to them:--glorified triangular relations:--heroic cuckoldry: (the cuckold, like the blessed prostitute, had become a European commodity: the example of King Mark had turned the heads of the poets: like the stag of Saint Hubert, the cuckold never appeared without a halo.) And Christophe saw also lovely damsels torn between passion and duty: their passion bade them follow a new lover: duty bade them stay with the old one, an old man who gave them money and was deceived by them. And in the end they plumped heroically for Duty. Christophe could not see how Duty differed from sordid interest: but the public was satisfied. The word Duty was enough for them: they did not insist on having the thing itself; they took the author's word for it.