Well, it was in this first epoch, spoken of by Cæsar, when "l'orge bouillait sur le plat des Toscans," that Regulus flourished. Therefore, from his very entry, Talma appeared as the stern republican, the man vowed to great causes. Yes, yes, Talma, you were indeed, this time, the Punic warrior, the colleague of Duillius--that conqueror to whom his contemporaries, still in ignorance of the titles and the honours with which defenders of their country should be rewarded, were giving a flute player to follow him wherever he went, and a rostral column to set up in front of his house; yes, you were indeed the consul who, when he landed on African shores, had to beat down monsters before he could beat down men, and who tested the implements of war, which were destined to break down the walls of Carthage, by crushing a boa-constrictor a hundred cubits in length. You were indeed that man whose two victories spelt two hundred towns, and who refused Carthage peace: Carthage, the Queen of the Mediterranean, the Sovereign of the Ocean, who had coasted down Africa as far as the Equator, who had spread North as far as the Cassiterides, and who possessed armed ships. O Carthaginians, merchants, lawyers and senators! you were lost at last. The race of traders had to give way to the race of warriors, speculators to soldiers, Hannons to Barcas; you would have consented to all the demands of Regulus, if there had not been found in Carthage a Lacedemonian, a mercenary, a Xantippe, who declared that Carthage still possessed the means for resisting, and demanded the chief command of the armies. The command was given him. He was a Greek. He lured the Romans into the plain, charged into them with his cavalry and crushed them beneath his elephants. It was at this stage of affairs, O Regulus--Talma that you made your entry into Carthage, but conquered, and a prisoner! Lucien Arnault had certainly not extracted all the dramatic force out of this splendid republican subject that it was capable of showing: he had certainly not shown us Rome, patient and indefatigable as the ploughing oxen; he had certainly not depicted commercial Carthage, with its armies of condottieri recruited from the sturdy Ligurians, that Strabo shows us, in the mountains of Genes, breaking down the rocks and carrying enormous burdens; from those clever slingers who came from the Balearic Isles, who could stop a stag in its flight, an eagle on the wing, with their stone-throwing; from the sturdy and strong Iberians, who seemed insensible to hunger and to fatigue, when they were marching to battle with their red cloaks and their two-edged-swords; finally, from the Numidians whom we fight even to-day at Constantine and at Djidjelli, terrible cavaliers, centaurs thin and fiery like their chargers. No,--although the epoch was not remote,--the piece lacked poetry; you, my dear Lucien, simply extracted from this mass of material the devotion of a single man, and did not choose to depict a people.