When this monstrous production of an overstrained imagination was put upon the stage, in 1843, it proved a complete failure. On the first night, in the middle of the play, hissing began. One of Hugo's faithful henchmen rushed to tell him. Hugo who, like Napoleon, relied upon his guard, answered as usual: "Get hold of some young men!" It is said that the messenger answered despondently, with downcast eyes: "There are no more young men." The generation to which Romanticism had appealed thirteen years before was no longer young, and, what was worse, it had grown weary; more than one of its poets had made too heavy demands upon it. A reaction was inevitable, and it set in that very year. It found its author and its histrionic genius. A young man as yet unknown to fame had left the provincial town in which he had been brought up, and come to Paris with a manuscript in his pocket. He was a thoroughly high-principled young man, with no great gift of imagination, but with much refinement and taste, and of a nobly serious turn of mind. His name was François Ponsard, and the title of the manuscript was _Lucrèce_. It was a tragedy on an antique theme--the rape and death of the chaste Lucretia. The style was sober and severe; it recalled Racine's. The public was tired of the Romantic style. For long the quiet citizen had shaken his head over such phrases of Hugo's as "the tones purled from the organ like water from a sponge," or "the table-linen was white as pale grief's winding-sheet," or "the old woman walked with bent, slow back." But until now there had been no one capable of competing with Hugo. Here at last seemed to be a possible rival. At the first glance Ponsard's play appeared to be exactly on the lines of the old classical tragedy. In their eagerness its welcomers did not notice in what a modern manner the antique theme was treated, how much Ponsard had learned from the Romanticists, how much of its warm colouring his drama owed to Victor Hugo, and how small an amount of originality the new-comer really possessed. All the public saw was that this drama was sane and simple. They saw that its heroine was Lucretia--not Hugo's horrible Lucrèce, that monster of bloodthirstiness and sensuality, but Rome's Lucretia, the emblem of chastity, another name for feminine purity. She represented marriage, the family, the poetry of home, as Antony and his kin had represented the morality of the foundling, and lawlessness. All Catholic and Classic France, all orthodox Switzerland, hymned the praises of the new dramatist and his play. At last Hugo had found his superior, Racine his equal. Even the critical Vinet joined in the great Hallelujah. He went into ecstasies over Ponsard's style: "This author spins gold as his Lucretia does wool &c."