In his next piece, "Atrée," Crebillon, who had commenced as a school-boy, now raised himself, as it were, to the dignity of a master. The comedians learned their parts with enthusiasm. On the morning of the first representation, the procureur summoned the young poet to his bedside, for he was then stricken with a mortal disease: "My friend," said he, "I have a presentiment that this very evening you will be greeted by the critics of the nation as a son of the great Corneille. There are but a few days of life remaining for me; I have no longer strength to walk, but be assured that I shall be at my post this evening, in the pit of the Théâtre Française." True to his word, the good old man had himself carried to the theatre. The intelligent judges applauded certain passages of the tragedy, in which wonderful power, as well as many startling beauties, were perceptible; but at the catastrophe, when Atreus compels Thyestes to drink the blood of his son, there was a general exclamation of horror--(Gabrielle de Vergy, be it remarked, had not then eaten on the stage the heart of her lover). "The procureur," says D'Alembert, "would have left the theatre in sorrow, if he had awaited the judgment of the audience in order to fix his own. The pit appeared more terrified than interested; it beheld the curtain fall without uttering a sound either of approval or condemnation, and dispersed in that solemn and ominous silence which bodes no good for the future welfare of the piece. But the procureur judged better than the public, or rather, he anticipated its future judgment. The play over, he proceeded to the green-room to seek his pupil, who, still in a state of the greatest uncertainty as to his fate, was already almost resigned to a failure; he embraced Crebillon in a transport of admiration: 'I die content,' said he. 'I have made you a poet; and I leave a man to the nation!'" And, in fact, at each representation of the piece, the public discovered fresh beauties, and abandoned itself with real pleasure to the terror which the poet inspired. A few days afterwards, the name of Crebillon became celebrated throughout Paris and the provinces, and all imagined that the spirit of the great Corneille had indeed revisited earth to animate the muse of the young Burgundian.