"Sire, are the agents in whom you have placed confidence, to watch over and control the theatre, responding properly to your beneficent designs? Was it intended that the liberty with which they were entrusted was to be used to advance the cause of melodrama to the detriment of tragedy? Ought the funds placed, by your liberality, at their disposal, in order to advance the cause of good taste, to be squandered over their own particular fancies, which tend to make the greatest names in Art subservient to the Melpomene of the boulevards, and to reduce their sublime art to the condition of a vile trade? We are convinced, sire, that the glory of your reign is concerned in the preservation of all sources of French glory, and we therefore consider it our duty to call your attention to the degradation by which the foremost of our theatres is threatened. Sire, the evil is already grave! In a few months' time it will be past redress; in a few months' time the theatre founded by Louis le Grand will be entirely closed to works which have been the delight of the most polite of courts, the most enlightened of nations; it will have fallen below the level of the meanest of stages, or, rather, the Théâtre-Français will have ceased to exist. _"(Signed)_ A. V. ARNAULT, N. LEMERCIER, VIENNET, JOUY, ANDRIEUX, JAY, O. LEROY" This curious epistle was capped by another quite as strange--or, more correctly speaking, it was preceded by it. The letter of Mademoiselle Duchesnois, which we shall produce in its entirety, in the same way that we have produced the petition of these gentlemen, was the rocket which warned the public that a great pyrotechnic display was about to take place. My readers will recall the visit M. Lafond paid me in my office, to ask me if I had a smart, well-groomed fellow in my play who could say to Queen Christine, "_Sacrebleu!_ your Majesty has not the right to assassinate this poor devil!" It will be remembered that I told him I had not. Whereupon M. Lafond had turned daintily upon his heels, remarking that his visit was, therefore, fruitless. After the reading of _Henri III._, M. Lafond had said to himself that the part of that extremely well set up courtier, the Duc de Guise, would be his by right; but, alack, he had seen the rôle given to Joanny, who played it strikingly well although he was not irreproachable. It had been just as bad for poor Mademoiselle Duchesnois: she had seen successively the rôle of Christine and that of the Duchesse de Guise pass over her; she had done me the honour of wishing to act them both, and each time, with infinite trouble, I had had to explain to her how impossible it was for her to undertake either rôle; consequently, she was furious. Now, anger is a bad counsellor, so it came about that Mademoiselle Duchesnois wrote the following letter under its sway:--