“Je sais mes perfidies, Œnone, et ne suis pas de ces femmes hardies, Qui, goûtant dans la crime une tranquille paix, Ont su se faire un front qui ne rougit jamais,” were greeted with cries of dissent and uproarious laughter. The words, “De l’austère pudeur les bornes sont passées...” were answered with shouts of “_C’est vrai! c’est vrai! il y a longtemps!_” While when she came to the passage in which Phèdre, in an agony of remorse, exclaims, “Et moi, triste rebut de la nature entière...” the ironical cheering, La Harpe tells us, seemed as if it would never cease. “Neither her beauty nor her sex,” writes Grimm, “could protect her any longer, and never did the public go so far in forgetfulness of its own dignity.” For these disgraceful scenes, the Duc de Duras seems to have been, in no small measure, responsible. In his anxiety to secure a hearing for Mlle. Raucourt, this well-meaning but maladroit nobleman had foolishly endeavoured to overawe the opposition by trebling the guard and “filling the pit with policemen,” who pounced upon and conducted to prison the most prominent of the disturbers. Such tactics naturally had the effect of exasperating the malcontents to the last degree and of alienating many whose sympathies had hitherto lain with the persecuted actress. “While the Comte d’Estaing is fighting the English, to make them recognise the independence of America,” it was bitterly said, “the Duc de Duras imprisons Frenchmen for refusing to applaud Raucourt!” Nevertheless, fair-minded persons appear to have been practically unanimous in condemning the conduct of the pit. “Nothing,” writes La Harpe, “can prove more clearly that the spirit of the _parterre_ is changed. The excesses in which it indulges, unknown until now, show how badly composed it is. Never would an assembly of respectable persons permit itself to say to a woman, whatever she might be, that she was ‘_le rebut de la nature entière_.’ One can decline to listen to her, but it is shocking and abominable to go to such lengths as this.” He adds that, in his opinion, the disturbance was organised by the elder Mlle. Sainval, “who knows better than any one how to set to work the crowd of venal ruffians who compose to-day a third of the _parterre_, and sometimes make themselves its masters”; and declares that so disgusted is he with the cabals and acrimonious quarrels which divide the theatrical and literary worlds, that he has determined to abandon dramatic criticism altogether, and has, accordingly, resigned his post on the _Mercure_.[118]