To show by yet another example that the Comédie Française has not been so much opposed as is often asserted to novelty in the dramatic art, it may be mentioned that at this theatre the wildly melodramatic and strikingly original _Antony_ of Alexander Dumas was first produced. This work, written, not, like Victor Hugo's plays, in verse, but in vigorous prose, has been no more fortunate than other masterpieces of the romantic drama in keeping the stage. The great success it met with at the time of its first production was due in a great measure to the powerful acting of Mme. Dorval. The basis of _Antony_, and, as Alexander Dumas tells us himself in his "Memoirs," its very germ, is a deeply compromising situation in which the hero finds himself with the heroine. They are on the point of being discovered when, to save the honour of his mistress, Antony (without consulting her on the subject) takes her life. Having stabbed her he exclaims to the persons who now enter the room, "That woman was resisting me; I have assassinated her." This outrageous piece had the same fate as Victor Hugo's admirably written and truly dramatic play, _Le Roi s'amuse_, in so far that it was, after a very few representations, forbidden by the Censorship. In the year 1833 a private person was for the first time named Director of the Comédie Française. Jouslin de La Salle was his name, and he was succeeded, first by M. Vedel, in 1837, and afterwards by M. Buloz, Director of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. In 1852 the affairs of the theatre were entrusted to a committee of six members of the Comédie Française under the direction of an "administrator"; the first administrator being M. Arsène Houssaye, the well-known author and journalist. M. Houssaye was replaced in 1856 by M. Empis, and M. Empis in 1860 by M. Édouard Thierry, a dramatist. The present director is M. Perrin. The subvention paid by the Government to the Comédie Française was fixed definitively in 1856 at 240,000 francs a year. Among the actors and actresses who have appeared at this famous establishment, often pleasantly described as La Maison de Molière (though Molière, as already seen, never set foot in it), may be mentioned Adrienne Lecouvreur, Mdlle. Mars, Mdlle. Clairon, Mdlle. Contat, Mdlle. Raucourt, Talma, Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, not to name many excellent comedians who in the present day are almost as well known in London as in Paris.