Ici meme, en ces parcs ou la mort nous fait paitre, Ou la hache nous tire au sort, Beaux poulets sont ecrits; maris, amants sont dupes. Caquetages; intrigues de sots. On y chante, on y joue, on y leve des jupes; On y fait chansons et bon mots; L'un pousse et fait bondir sur les toits, sur les vitres, Un ballon tout gonfle de vent, Comme sont les discours des sept cents plats belitres, {273} Dont Barere est le plus savant. L'autre court; l'autre saute; et braillent, boivent, rient, Politiqueurs et raisonneurs; Et sur les gonds de fer soudain les portes crient, Des juges tigres nos seigneurs Le pourvoyeur parait. Quelle sera la proie Que la hache appelle aujourd'hui? Francois de Neufchateau, who became a Director after the revolution of Fructidor, and the younger Chenier, were perhaps the best dramatists of the epoch. The former hardly deserves extended notice. Chenier's _Charles IX_, played at the outbreak of the Revolution, had a great success as a political play, and he followed it up with several others that served as pegs on which excited audiences might hang their political hats. Voltaire's _Brutus_, unplayable half a century before, was all the vogue now; and the dramatist had only to air democratic sentiments to please his audience. The thing went far, and art suffered in the process. Plot and dialogue took on the feverish colours of the Revolution. Audiences howled _la Carmagnole_ or the _ca ira_, before the curtain went up; and when the play began, revelled in highly-spiced, political dramatics, in which the Pope soon became the most reviled and popular of villains. The Pope {274} drunk, the Pope kicked in the stomach by his brutal confederate George III, the Pope making love to Madame de Polignac, the Pope surrounded by the tyrants of Europe swallowed up by the flame-belching volcano of an enchanted island, such were the titbits that brought moisture to the palates of the connoisseurs of the drama in Paris. The efforts of Joseph Chenier to get his tragedy _Timoleon_, played, at a moment when he was not in good repute with the Committee of Public Safety, may serve as an example of many similar incidents. The words, "We need laws, not blood," in his _Charles IX_, had displeased Robespierre and Billaud-Varennes, and the Jacobins were resolved to prevent any new production. He read the Ms. of his _Timoleon_ however, with great success, to the company of the Theatre de la Republique. Vilate may be left to continue the tale: