"The drama of passion must necessarily be historical drama. History bequeaths to us the passionate deeds which were really done. If in the midst of our modern society we were to attempt to lay bare the heart which beats under our ugly short black coats, the resemblance between the hero and the public would be too great; the spectator who was following the development of a passion would desire to have it arrested exactly where it would have stopped in his own case. He would cry: 'Stop! that is wrong; that is not how I feel. When the woman whom I love deceives me I suffer, certainly, but I neither kill her nor myself.' And the outcry against exaggeration and melodrama would drown the applause of the few who feel that the passions of the nineteenth century are the same as those of the sixteenth, and that the blood can course as hotly beneath a cloth coat as beneath a steel corselet." We can imagine the applause which followed this speech. All wished to show that they belonged to these few. Passion was the order of the day, and they proved themselves to be passionate by applauding. And _Antony_ truly is a symphony of raging passions, the like of which it would be difficult to find. After several years of travel the hero returns to Paris and finds that the woman he loves is married. He saves her life at the risk of his own by stopping her runaway horses; the shaft of the carriage has pierced his breast; he is carried into her house. Antony is an illegitimate child and a foundling; hence as a lover he is a rebel against the laws of society. "Other men," he says to the woman he loves, "have a father, a mother, a brother--arms which open for them when they are in trouble; I have not so much as a tombstone upon which I can read my name and weep. Other men have a country; I have none, for I belong to no family. One name meant to me everything that I possessed, and that name, your name, I am forbidden to pronounce." The lady reminds him of social obligations: "Call them duties or call them prejudices; such as they are, they exist." "Why," he replies, "should I submit to these laws? Not one among those by whom they were made has spared me a suffering or done me a service. I have received nothing but injustice, and I owe nothing but hatred. My unfortunate mother's shame has been branded on my forehead."