Voltaire had to take infinite trouble in order to get permission to produce his _Mahomet_. The official censor, Crébillon, having objected to _Mahomet_--in a spirit of jealousy, as Voltaire maintained--its author obtained from the Duke de Richelieu permission to entrust the censorship of the work to his friend, d’Alembert; though Crébillon, from one point of view, seems to have been not far wrong, since _Mahomet_, on its production as authorised by d’Alembert, excited on the part of the religious world general disapprobation, so that Voltaire, after a time, had to withdraw the piece. The ingenious and daring measures by which Beaumarchais at last succeeded in getting removed from his _Marriage of Figaro_ the veto pronounced upon it by King Louis XVI. have been told in another place. This brings us to the time of the Revolution, when all restrictions on personal liberty were, for a time at least, abolished. Theatrical representations were now given inside Notre Dame. On the first anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI., January 21st, 1794, was performed at the National Opera, “on behalf of, and for the people, gratis, in joyful commemoration of the death of the tyrant,” _Miltiades at Marathon_, the _Siege of Thionville_, and the _Offering to Liberty_. The censorship, abolished for a moment, was soon re-established under the Republic; and now stage kings and stage queens were absolutely suppressed. “Not only were they forbidden to appear on the stage,” says a writer on this subject, “but even their names were not to be pronounced behind the scenes, and the expressions ‘côté du roi,’ ‘côté de la reine,’ were changed into ‘côté jardin,’ ‘côté cour,’ which, at the theatre of the Tuileries, indicated respectively the left and right of the stage from the stage point of view. At first all pieces in which kings and queens appeared were prohibited, but the dramas of _sans culottes_ origin were so stupid that the Republic was absolutely obliged to return to the old monarchical repertory. Kings, however, were turned into chiefs; princes and dukes became representatives of the people; seigneurs subsided into mayors, and substitutes more or less synonymous were found for such offensive words as crown, throne, sceptre, etc. The scenes of most of the new operas were laid in Italy, Prussia, Portugal--everywhere except France, where it would have been indispensable from a political, and impossible from a poetical point of view, to make the lovers address one another as ‘citoyen, and ‘citoyenne.’” One of the reasons put forward for reintroducing the censorship under the Republic was that for a long time past the aristocracy had “taken refuge in the administration of various theatres”; whereupon it was resolved that the opera “should be encouraged and defended against its enemies.” At the same time the managers were arrested as suspicious persons, and replaced by republicans whose republicanism was beyond question.