Poor Harel! He still had his wits about him, when nobody else had any left or even dreamt of such a thing! It was the Terror of 1793 on a grand scale. In 1793, the worst days counted their thirty or thirty-five victims. Now, the newspapers admitted to between seven and eight hundred deaths per day! It was a strange thing! But other diseases seemed to have disappeared; they were stayed from sheer stupefaction; death had no longer any but the one way of striking. One left a friend at night, shook his hand, saying, _"Au revoir_!" and, th next day, a voice would come from one knew not where, out of chaos, would whisper in one's ear-- "You knew such and such a person?" "Yes ... Well?" "He is dead!" One had said _au revoir_; it was _adieu_ one ought to have said instead. Soon, there was a shortness of coffins: in that terrible _steeplechase_ between death and the coffin-makers, the latter were outdistanced. They wrapped the bodies in tapestries; they rumbled along ten, fifteen, twenty, to the church at once. Relatives followed the common carts or not, as the case might be. Each knew the number of his own dead and mourned them. A mass was said for all collectively; then they wended their way to the cemetery, and tipped the contents of the tapestry into the common grave, and covered them all over with a shroud of lime. The 18th of April was the crisis of the first outbreak--the numbers rose to nearly a thousand! At that time, I lived, as I have said, in the rue Saint-Lazare, in the square d'Orléans, and I saw from my windows every day fifty to sixty funerals pass on their way to the Montmartre cemetery. It was with this prospect before my eyes that I wrote one of my gayest comedies: _Le Mari de la veuve._ This is how the play came about. Mademoiselle Dupont, the excellent soubrette of the Comédie-Française, who laughed with such rosy lips and white teeth, she who was the most impudent Martine I have ever seen, had obtained a benefit performance. I had known her more at Firmin's house privately than at the theatre; she had never acted in any of my plays. One morning--it was, so far as I can recollect, the very day before 29 March, on which day the cholera was to burst forth--she came to see me. Everything was ready for her benefit. She came to ask me to write her a narrative scene. It was Saturday, I think: the performance was to take place on the following Tuesday or Wednesday. There was no time to lose. I am stupid at improvising anything appropriate to such an occasion as this; and yet how could I refuse the charming soubrette a demand of so little importance? "Defer the performance until Saturday," I said to her, "and, instead of one scene, I will write you a one-act comedy." "Will you promise to do this?" "On my honour!" "I will go and see if it be possible, and I will return in an hour's time."