... C'était trop pour moi des lauriers de la guerre; Je voulais une gloire et plus rare et plus chère. Rome, en proie aux fureurs des partis triomphants, Mourante sous les coups de ses propres enfants, Invoquait à la fois mon bras et mon génie: Je me fis dictateur, je sauvai la patrie!" These to Napoleon:-- "J'ai gouverné le monde à mes ordres soumis, Et j'impose silence à tous mes ennemis! Leur haine ne saurait atteindre ma mémoire, J'ai mis entre eux et moi l'abîme de ma gloire." When one re-reads at the end of ten, twenty, or thirty years either the lines which the Censorship forbade, or the plays it suppressed, one is completely amazed at the stupidity of Governments. As soon as a revolution has cut off the seven heads of a literary hydra, governments make all speed to collect them again and to stick them back on the trunk that feigned death whilst taking care not to lose its hold on life. As though the Censorship had ever annihilated any of the works that have been forbidden to be played! As though the Censorship had strangled _Tartuffe, Mahomet, le Mariage de Figaro, Charles IX., Pinto, Marion Delorme_ and _Antony_! No, when one of these virile pieces is hounded from the theatre where it has made its mark, it waits, calm and erect, until those who have proscribed it fall or pass away, and, when they are fallen or dead, when its persecutors are hurled from their thrones, or entering their tombs, the calm and immortal daughter of Genius, omnipotent and great, enters the enclosure that the mannikins have closed against her, from whence they have disappeared, and their forgotten crowns being too small for her brow become the sport of her feet.