If you can get those four lines said properly by a supernumerary you will indeed be a great teacher! Or if you can get them said by an artiste, you will indeed be a clever manager! Then all the discussion upon Corneille and Gamier, which I imitated in _Christine_, is excellently appropriate. It had, in fact, come to open fighting from the moment they accused us of offending against good taste the theme supported by M. Étienne, M. Viennet and M. Onésime Leroy, and of placing before the public the opinion held about Corneille, when Cardinal Richelieu influenced the Academy to censure the _Cid_ in the same way that we in our turn had censured it! When I say _the same way_, I mean the same as regards sequence of time and not of affiliation: Academicians do not reproduce; as is well-known, it is only with difficulty that they even manage to produce. In conclusion, the second act is admirably summed up in this line of Langely-- "Ça! qui dirait qu'ici c'est moi qui suis le fou?" Then comes the third act, full of imagination, in which Laffemas, Richelieu's black servant, affords contrast to the grey figure of His Eminence; where Didier and Marion come to ask hospitality from the Marquis de Nangis, lost in the midst of a troop of mountebanks; when Didier learns from Saverny that Marie and Marion are one and the same woman, and where, his heart broken by one of the greatest sorrows that can wring man's soul, he gives himself up to the guilty lieutenant. The fourth act is a masterpiece. It has been objected that this act no more belongs to the play than a drawer does to a chest of drawers; granted! But in that drawer the author has enclosed the very gem of the whole play: the character of Louis XIII., the wearied, melancholy, ill, weak, cruel and superstitious king, who has nobody but a clown to distract his thoughts, and who only talks with him of scaffolds and of beheadings and of tombs, not daring to complain to anyone else of the state of dependence in which the terrible Cardinal holds him. Listen to this-- "LANGELY.--Votre Majesté donc souffre bien?