Lafarge had laughed hugely at de Leuven's idea of making me his collaborator. For, indeed, what notice would the Parisian stage take of an uneducated child; a poor provincial lad, buried away in a small town in the Ile-de-France; ignorant both of French and foreign literatures; hardly acquainted with the names of the great; feeling only a tepid sympathy with their most highly praised masterpieces, his lack of artistic education having veiled their style from him; setting to work without knowing the theory of constructing a plot, an action, a catastrophe, a _dénoûment_; having never read to the end of _Gil Blas_, or _Don Quixote_, or _le Diable boiteux_--books which are held by all teachers to be worthy of universal admiration, and in which, I confess to my shame, the man who has succeeded to the child does not even to-day feel a very lively interest; reading, instead, all that is bad in Voltaire, who was then regarded as the very antithesis of politics and religion; having never opened a volume of Walter Scott or of Cooper, those two great romance-writers, one of whom understood men thoroughly, the other of whom divined God's workings marvellously; whilst, on the contrary, he had devoured all the naughty books of Pigault-Lebrun, raving over them, _le Citateur_ in particular; ignorant of the name of Goethe, or Schiller, or Uhland, or André Chénier; having heard Shakespeare mentioned, but only as a barbarian from whose dunghill Ducis had collected those pearls called _Othello_, _Hamlet_ and _Romeo and Juliet_, but knowing by heart his Bertin, his Parny, his Legouvé, his Demoustier. Lafarge was unquestionably in the right, and Adolphe must have had plenty of time to waste to undertake such a task, the hopelessness of which alone could take away from its ridiculousness. But Adolphe, with that Anglo-German stolidness of his, manfully persevered in the work undertaken, and we sketched out a scheme of a comedy in one act, entitled the _Major de Strasbourg_: it was neither good nor bad. Why the Major of Strasbourg, any more than the Major of Rochelle or of Perpignan? I am sure I cannot tell. And I have also completely forgotten the plot or development of that embryonic dramatic work.