“The play is done; the curtain drops, Slow falling to the prompter’s bell: A moment yet the actor stops, And looks around, to say farewell. It is an irksome word and task; And when he’s laughed and said his say, He shows, as he removes the mask, A face that’s anything but gay.” Horace Walpole will be found iterating and reiterating in his letters a favourite apophthegm of his—that the world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. One might safely assume beforehand that a people of so histrionic a turn as the French would make good use of the histrionic metaphor of life, in their _belles lettres_, of whatever date. And in point of fact the figure is a well-worked one in French literature. Now it is a Cardinal de Retz, who, on being named coadjutor to his uncle, the Archbishop of Paris, describes himself as thereupon ceasing to be “in the pit, or at best in the orchestra, playing and funning with the fiddles,” but mounting thence to the stage itself. Indeed, a modern critic has remarked that Retz is perpetually making use of these expressions and images of _théâtre_ and _comédie_. He was an accomplished actor from first to last—not above the line of low comedy now and then, and quite an adept in the Cloak-and-Sword business. Now again it is his contemporary, Madame de Motteville, who so frequently represents herself as an occupant of one of the best boxes, intent on diverting herself with the _belle comédie_ that was being played under her eyes. “Les cabinets des rois,” says Madame—who ought to know—are theatres in which pieces of universal interest are for ever being played: some simply comic; others decidedly tragical, though so frequently occasioned by the merest trifles. So, again, Madame des Ursins (the Princess Orsino), another _habituée_ behind the scenes, and herself a star of the first magnitude in any working company, describes the world as _une comédie où il y avait souvent de bien mauvais acteurs_. Then, too, we have the Abbé Chaulieu, when dancing attendance on the Duke of Vendôme, and assisting at all the fêtes and galas got up in that prince’s honour, writing in a sort of apologetic strain to his sister-in-law, that since all the world’s a stage, one must just be content to don cap and bells with the rest[13]—for if all your men and women are merely players, motley’s your only wear. Of another _spirituel_, and very unspiritual, abbé of that period, Choisy, it has been observed, that his life resembled a comedy, rife with all that is most various and most improbable: his career of fourscore years composed a complete masquerade; for “this man in his time play’d many parts,” and in each of them he seems to have acted with professional aptitude, facility, and zest.