keeps happy things for the present and puts care behind him till the morrow; such a man knows not the daily struggle and nightly labour; he does not live by lamplight, but by the light of the sun. He lies down when the robin sings his evening song and wakes when the lark begins to sing; nothing disturbs the order of Nature for him; his day is day and his night is night; and, when his last day or final night comes, he has lived his life within its natural limits. I shall have gone through mine hurrying along on the brakeless engine of work. I shall not have sat down at any table belonging to those lengthy banquets where people stay till they become intoxicated; I shall have tasted from all sorts of cups; and the only ones I shall have drained to the dregs (for man's existence, however rapid, always has time for doing this) will have been the bitter cups! At this time, in 1832, however, I had not yet become the being I now am. I was then a young man of twenty-nine, eager after pleasure, eager for love and for life, eager after everything, in fact, but hatred. It is a strange thing that I have never been able to hate on account of any personal wrong or injury. If I have harboured any antipathy in my heart, if I have shown, either in my words, or in my writings, any aggressive sentiment, it was against those people who set themselves against the growth of art, and who opposed progress in politics. If to-day, after twenty-five years have elapsed, I attack, M. Viennet, M. Jay, M. Étienne, the whole of the Académie, in short, or, at any rate, the major portion of its members, it is not in the least because these gentlemen collectively signed petitions against me or, individually, prohibited my plays; it is because they hindered France from marching towards the supreme conquest of art, and founding a universal monarchy of the intellect. If, after thirty years, I bear a grudge against Louis-Philippe, it is not because he stopped my salary when I gave myself to literature, or because he demanded my resignation when I had a drama received at the Théâtre-Français; it is because this would-be citizen-king had a rooted aversion to new ideas, an instinctive distaste for all movements which tended to advance the human race. Now, how can you expect me, who am all for progress, to admit without question, on whatever side I meet them, death, or inaction, which is the likeness of death!