Adèle loves Antony, but avoids him. In the course of a journey she takes, she has to spend a night at an inn; he surprises her there and takes possession of her with violence. In spite of this dastardly act she continues to love him. We meet the couple again in Paris. Their story is known. We hear hypocritical women, who manage to combine secret leanings to the forbidden with irreproachable outward behaviour, destroying Adèle's reputation. Their attacks on her evoke outbursts of indignation from the really worthy, indignation against society and its hypocrisies. But the drama is drawing to a close. The husband, Colonel d'Hervey, returns from a journey; Antony tries in vain to persuade Adèle to escape with him; the step of the injured husband is heard in the anteroom; the lover draws his Romantic dagger and plunges it into Adèle's breast; to save her honour he meets d'Hervey with the cry: "Elle me résistait; je l'ai assassinée!" What chiefly strikes us now on reading the play is its preposterous absurdity. We feel that if we were to see it acted, as a new play, we should not be able to refrain from smiling at the parts intended to touch us. We can hardly understand to-day how it happened that on the night of its first performance in 1831 a select audience were excited by it to the wildest enthusiasm. They applauded, shed tears, sobbed, shouted Bravo! The effect of the play was heightened by the splendid acting of Bocage and Marie Dorval. Dumas tells that a handsome green coat he was wearing was positively torn off his back and into scraps, which were preserved as relics by the enthusiastic youths who formed a large proportion of the audience; and even if we do not take this anecdote quite literally, there is no doubt of the unboundedness of the enthusiasm. The explanation is, that men never laugh at a work which gives expression to their own moods and feelings. Antony was not merely the impersonation of passion verging on savagery, in combination with a tenderness so great that it would rather take upon itself the responsibility of a murder than expose the beloved one to insult and scorn; he was also the Byronic, mysterious young hero, who is predestined to struggle against the injustice of fate, and is greater than his fate. But even in those days there were not wanting critics who saw the weaknesses of the play. Bocage, who acted Antony, considered the closing speech so foolish, that he would have omitted it if he could. He did omit it one evening, and the curtain fell without it, but only with the result that the audience began to shout and scream as if possessed. They would not be defrauded of their speech. Bocage had gone; but Madame Dorval, who was still lying dead upon the stage, had the presence of mind to order the curtain to be raised again, upon which, holding up her head, she said with a smile and a transposition of the pronouns, "Je lui résistais, il m'a assassinée!"[1] One sharply satirical voice was raised within the precincts