What comedian but Molière has combined with such depths—with the indignation of Alceste, the self-deception of Tartufe, the blasphemy of Don Juan—such wildness of irresponsible mirth, such humour, such wit! Even now, when more than two hundred years have sped by, when so much water has flowed under the bridges and has borne away so many trifles of contemporary mirth (_cetera fluminis ritu feruntur_), even now we never laugh so well as when Mascarille and Vadius and M. Jourdain tread the boards in the Maison de Molière. Since those mobile dark brows of yours ceased to make men laugh, since your voice denounced the “demoniac” manner of contemporary tragedians, I take leave to think that no player has been more worthy to wear the canons of Mascarille or the gown of Vadius than M. Coquelin of the Comédie Française. In him you have a successor to your Mascarille so perfect, that the ghosts of playgoers of your date might cry, could they see him, that Molière had come again. But, with all respect to the efforts of the fair, I doubt if Mdlle. Barthet, or Mdme. Croizette herself, would reconcile the town to the loss of the fair De Brie, and Madeleine, and the first, the true Célimène, Armande. Yet had you ever so merry a _soubrette_ as Mdme. Samary, so exquisite a Nicole? Denounced, persecuted, and buried hugger-mugger two hundred years ago, you are now not over-praised, but more worshipped, with more servility and ostentation, studied with more prying curiosity than you may approve. Are not the Molièristes a body who carry adoration to fanaticism? Any scrap of your handwriting (so few are these), any anecdote even remotely touching on your life, any fact that may prove your house was numbered 15 not 22, is eagerly seized and discussed by your too minute historians. Concerning your private life, these men often speak more like malicious enemies than friends; repeating the fabulous scandals of Le Boulanger, and trying vainly to support them by grubbing in dusty parish registers. It is most necessary to defend you from your friends—from such friends as the veteran and inveterate M. Arsène Houssaye, or the industrious but puzzle-headed M. Loiseleur. Truly they seek the living among the dead, and the immortal Molière among the sweepings of attorneys’ offices. As I regard them (for I have tarried in their tents) and as I behold their trivialities—the exercises of men who neglect Molière’s works to gossip about Molière’s great-grand-mother’s second-best bed—I sometimes wish that Molière were here to write on his devotees a new comedy, “Les Molièristes.” How fortunate were they, Monsieur, who lived and worked with you, who saw you day by day, who were attached, as Lagrange tells us, by the kindest loyalty to the best and most honourable of men, the most open-handed in friendship, in charity the most delicate, of the heartiest sympathy! Ah, that for one day I could behold you, writing in