I can see you still, Talma!--may your great spirit hear me and thrill with pleasure at not being forgotten!--I can see you still as with scornful smile upon your lips you slowly diminish the distance that separates you from your accuser; I can see and hear you still as you place your hand upon his shoulder, and, draped like one of the finest statues in Herculaneum or Pompeii, you utter these words to him, in the vibrating voice which could penetrate to the very depths of one's being:-- "Je n'examine pas si ta haine enhardie Poursuit dans Clodius l'époux de Valérie; Et si Catiline, par cet avis fatal, Pretend servir ma cause ou punir un rival." O Talma! your incisive and sonorous intonation took root in the hearts of all who heard you. It was indeed a fearfully ungrateful and barren soil which at that unpoetical period of the Empire was left you to cultivate, for, had you been disheartened by its sterility, there would have been nothing great, or fine, or wide-spreading, during all those thirty years in which you wore the Roman sandal or the Greek. Is it that the spirit of genius, with all its absorbing power, is mortal like that of the upas tree or the manchineel? I should like to continue speaking of Sylla to the end of the play in order to render tribute to the prodigious talent Talma possessed, and to follow him in the twofold development of his creation of the rôle of Sylla and the details of that rôle. But what would be the good? Who is interested in these things nowadays? Who amuses himself by recalling thirty years after its extinction the intonation of an actor as he declaimed line or hemistich or word? What does it matter to M. Guizard, to M. Léon Faucher, to the President of the Republic, in what manner Talma replied to Lænas, when he was sent by the Roman populace to learn from Sylla the number of the condemned, and asked him-- "Combien en proscris-tu, Sylla?" What matters it to those gentlemen to know how Talma uttered his "Je ne sais pas!" At the most, they can only remember the cadence of voice with which General Cavaignac pronounced those four words when he was asked how many people he had transported untried out of France. And let us remember that it is now but two years since the Dictator of 1848 uttered these four words, which richly deserve to hold a place in the annals of history beside those of Sylla. But though Talma was by turns simple, great, magnificent, it was in the abdication scene that he rose to actual sublimity. It is true that the abdication of Sylla recalled that at Fontainebleau, and, we repeat, we have no doubt that the resemblance between the modern and the ancient Dictator produced an immense impression upon the vulgar public. This opinion was held by the Censorship of 1821, which cut out these lines because they were supposed to refer in turn to Bonaparte, first consul, and Napoleon, the emperor. These to Bonaparte:--