"Listen, my dear boy," Lassagne went on, with that wonderful sweetness of his in eyes and voice, and above all with that almost fatherly kindliness that I still noticed in him, when I met him by chance twenty-five years later and had the happiness to greet him,--"listen: you want to become a literary man?" "Oh yes!" I exclaimed. "Not so loud!" he said, laughing; "you know I told you not to talk so loud about that ... here, at any rate. Well, when you do write, do not take the literature of the Empire as your model: that is my advice." "But what shall I take?" "Well, upon my word, I should be much puzzled to tell you. Our young dramatic authors, Soumet, Guiraud, Casimir Delavigne, Ancelot, certainly possess talent; Lamartine and Hugo are poets--I therefore leave them out of the question; they have not done theatrical work, and I do not know if they are likely to, though if they ever do, I doubt whether they would succeed...." "Why not?" "Because the one is too much of a visionary, and the other too much of a thinker. Neither the one nor the other lives in the actual world, and the theatre, you see, my lad, is humanity. I say, then, that our young dramatic authors--Soumet, Guiraud, Casimir Delavigne, Ancelot--have talent; but take particular notice of what I am telling you: they belong purely and solely to a period of transition; they are links which connect the chain of the past to the chain of the future, bridges which lead from what has been to what shall be." "And what is that which shall be ...?" "Ah! there, my young friend, you ask me more than I can tell you. The public has not made up its mind; it knows already what it does not want any longer, but it does not yet know what it wants." "In poetry, in drama or in fiction?" "In drama and in fiction ... there, nothing is settled; in poetry we need not look farther than to Lamartine and Hugo, who represent the spirit of the age quite sufficiently." "But Casimir Delavigne ...?" "Ah! he is different. Casimir Delavigne is the poet of the people: we must leave him his circle; he does not enter into competition." "Well, in comedy, tragedy, drama, whom ought one to follow?" "In the first place, you should never imitate anybody; you should study: the man who follows a guide is obliged to walk behind. Will you be content to walk behind?" "No." "Then you must study. Do not attempt to produce either comedy, or tragedy, or drama; take passions, events, characters, smelt them all down in the furnace of your imagination, and raise statues of Corinthian bronze." "What is Corinthian bronze?" "Don't you know?" "I know nothing." "What a happy state to be in!" "Why?" "Because then you can find things out for yourself: you need only measure things by the standard of your own intelligence: you need no other rule than that of your own capacity. Corinthian bronze?... have you heard that once upon a time Mummius burnt Corinth?"