In the stormy year of 1830, when the July Revolution made an end for ever of the Bourbon cause in France, the Comédie Française was again a scene of fierce and bitter strife. _Hernani_, a drama in verse, had been accepted from the pen of Victor Hugo, the brilliant and exuberant master of a new Romantic school of poets, who had determined to emancipate themselves from the traditions, which had long since hardened into literary dogmas, of the Classical school of the siècle de Louis Quatorze. On the night of the first performance each side, Romanticists and Classicists, had packed the theatre with their partisans, and the air was charged with feeling. The curtain rose, but less than two lines were uttered before the pent-up passions of the audience burst forth:-- "DONA JOSEFA--'Serait-ce déjà lui? C'est bien à l'escalier Dérobé----'" [Illustration: THE TROCADERO.] The last word had not passed the actress's lips when a howl of execration rose from the devotees of Racine, outraged by the author's heresy in permitting an adjective to stray into the second line of the verse. The Romanticists, led by Théophile Gautier, answered in withering blasphemies, and soon the pit became a pandemonium of warring factions. Night after night the literary sects renewed their contests, and the representations, as Victor Hugo said, became battles rather than performances. The year 1830 was the '93 of the Romantic school, but the passions it evoked have long since been calmed, and _Hernani_ and _Le Roi s'Amuse_, which latter was suppressed by the Government of Louis Philippe after the first performance, have taken their place in the classic repertory of the Théâtre Français beside the tragedies of Racine and Corneille.