Racan, it will be remembered, once presented himself before the Academy with the scraps of a speech he had meant to read. "Gentlemen," he said, "I had prepared a splendid speech, which could not fail to have won your suffrages; but my big white rabbit gobbled it up this morning.... I have brought you the remains, and you must try to make the best you can of them!" "Ah! indeed," replied Hugo; "I could have done that, but it never occurred to me." M. Liadière's _Jane Shore_ did for Mademoiselle Georges what M. Lemercier's _Jane Shore_ had done for Talma. It was, besides, the first attempt Mademoiselle Georges had made in Shakespearean drama: she led up to it in _Christine_ and in _Lucrèce Borgia._ It was the age of limitations; no one was strong enough to be original. They had to look for fresh things across the frontier; they sought admission to the theatres on the shoulders of Rowe or Schiller: if they were successful, they quietly put the German or English author outside; if they came a cropper, they fell on him, and it broke the shock of their fall. After M. Liadière's production of _Jane Shore_, the Odéon presented M. Ancelot's _Fiesque._ But M. Ancelot was a purist: he never for one moment supposed that Schiller's _Fiesque_ could be presented complete as in the German play; therefore he entirely and discreetly suppressed the character of the Moor. Can you imagine _Fiesque_ shorn of the Moor! without the Moor! the main peg on which the drama is hung! Without the Moor! the character for which Schiller constructed his play! When shall we have a law which, whilst permitting translation, will forbid mutilation? The Italians have no law affecting translators; but they have a proverb as short as it is expressive, as concise as it is true, "_Traduttore, traditore._" Meanwhile, the Romantic school, although still shy in theatrical and literary circles, was boldly invading other branches of art. M. Thiers, in history, had published his _Révolution française_, and Botta his _Histoire d'Italie_; M. de Barante was producing his excellent _Chronique des ducs de Bourgogne_, a work full of knowledge and brilliancy, which justly, this time, though accidentally, opened the Academy doors to its author. But the struggle was more noticeable in painting. David dead and Girodet just dead, their successors were such men as Scheffer, Delacroix, Sigalon, Schnetz, Coigniet, Boulanger and Géricault. The works of this galaxy of bold young artists adorned the walls of the Salon of 1824. Scheffer hung his _Mort de Gaston de Foix._ It was one of his first pictures, and rather gaudy in colouring, but the face of the warrior kneeling at the head of Gaston stood out most remarkably; Scheffer was the painter-poet, the best translator of Goethe I know; he re-created a whole world of German characters, from Mignon to the King of Thule, from Faust to Marguerite.