separate contract; but he did over my wishing to maintain my incognito: I had a hard struggle over this, and he poured upon me all the dazzling splendours of his wit and the thundering ammunition of his paradoxes. I held out and Harel retired conquered. It was settled and signed that I was to have my separate contract, that I should not be named, that M. Gaillardet should alone be mentioned by name on the night of the first performance and on the bills, and that he alone should take the whole of the rights granted by the Porte-Saint-Martin theatre at the time when he signed his treaty; but, I reserved to myself the right to put the drama under my own name among my complete works. From that moment, Verteuil never left me; he came every morning, and, as much dictated as written by his hand, every night he carried a scene away with him. After the prison scene, Harel rushed in. It was a _chef d'œuvre,_ which would even put the success of _Henri III._ into the shade. I laughed. I really must let my name be given; it was impossible otherwise. I grew angry, and Harel took himself off in despair. Theatrical managers, in those days, had a singular idea to which, indeed, they have returned latterly: it was that they made more money, with equal merit, when the name of the author was known, than if it were unknown. I think they were mistaken. The better the name be known, the more it rouses jealous feelings on the part of criticism: the less it be known, the more kindly does criticism favour it. Criticism, which does not produce children of its own, only picks up and fondles orphans which it can adopt; but it turns, angry and growling, on those children who are supported by a vigorous parentage. Nowadays, managers have fallen into the opposite abuse. They have hunted out from the collections of proverbs all the pieces which were no good at all--comedies which were not comedies, dramas which were not dramas--and played them with more or less success. The object of this attempt was, I believe, meant at least to prove that dramatic art is an art by itself; a rare and difficult one, seeing that Greece has only bequeathed to us Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes; Rome, only Plautus, Terence and Seneca; England, only Shakespeare and Sheridan; Italy, only Machiavelli and Alfieri; Spain, only Lopes de Vega, Calderon, Alarcon and Tirso de Molina; Germany, only Goethe and Schiller; and France, only Corneille, Rotrou, Molière, Racine, Voltaire and Beaumarchais; that is to say, but twenty-three names floating on an ocean of twenty-three centuries! Actually, this is what happens in my opinion: more noise is made round the work of a known author; people wait for and receive the appearance of such work with greater curiosity; but the public also becomes more exacting in proportion as the reputation of the writer increases: they get tired of hearing a man called _happy_; as the Athenians grew tired