_Thou shalt not kill._ The least little dramatic murder was no longer permissible, and the fifth act had become an impossibility. They considered the poniard extravagant, poison monstrous, the axe horrible beyond words. They would have liked dramatic heroes to live to the age of Melchisedec; and yet it has been a recognized fact, from time immemorial, that the object of every tragedy is to have a poor devil of a great man, who cannot help himself, murdered in the last act, just as the object of every comedy is to join in matrimony two idiots of _jeunes premiers_ of about sixty years each. It was about this time that I threw into the fire--after having taken a duplicate, as almost always happens--two superb and magnificent Middle-Age dramas, one in verse, the other in prose, in which the heroes were quartered and boiled on the stage, which would have been very entertaining and decidedly unusual. To conform to their ideas, I have since composed an antique tragedy in five acts called _Héliogabale_, the hero of which throws himself into the privy, an extremely novel situation and one that has the merit of introducing a bit of scenery not yet seen on the stage.--I have also written a modern drama, very much superior to _Antoni,--Arthur,_ or _L'Homme Fatal,_ where the providential idea arrives in the shape of a Strasbourg pâté de foie gras, which the hero eats to the last crumb after committing various rapes, and that, combined with his remorse, brings on a frightful attack of indigestion of which he dies.--A moral ending, if ever there was one, which proves that _God is just_, and that vice is always punished and virtue rewarded. As for the monstrosity species, you know how they have dealt with that, how they have abused Han d'Islande the cannibal, Habibrah the obi, Quasimodo the bell-ringer, and Triboulet, who is only a hunch-back--all that family so strangely swarming--all those gigantic deformities whom my dear neighbor sends crawling and leaping through the virgin forests and the cathedrals of his romances. Neither the great strokes _à la_ Michael Angelo, nor the curiosities worthy of Callot, nor the effects of light and shade after the fashion of Goya, could find favor before them; they sent him back to his odes when he wrote novels, to his novels when he wrote dramas: the ordinary tactics of journalists who always praise what you have done at the expense of what you are doing. A fortunate man, however, is he who is acknowledged to be superior, even by the _feuilletonistes_, in all his works,--except, of course, the particular one with whom they are dealing,--and who need only write a theological treatise or a manual of cooking to have his plays admired.