MY DEAR SIR,--Happening, some days ago, to read an account of your deserved good fortune, I remember having had some correspondence with you regarding a play,--“A White Marriage.” I chanced to look in my strong box the same day, and there discovered the play itself, where it had lain a whole year,--a fate most unworthy of its great merit, and which could only have occurred by the most astonishing forgetfulness on my part. I make you ten thousand apologies, and assure you the loss is mine; for since reading the piece, I beg to have the honour of presenting it at the Gaieté Theatre. You have written a play which must command success; for I cannot understand it, nor can the public, and I presume no more can you. All you have to do, therefore, is to have it presented, and then sit down and wait for the critics to explain the play to you as to the rest of the world. Each one is bound to give a different explanation; they will get to quarrelling, and your fortune will be made. It is essential, in the drama of to-day, to be complex; and when you are so complex that nobody, from the author down, knows what the devil a play is about, or what problems you are proving or disproving, you will be placed upon the same pinnacle with Ibsen, Maaterlinck, and the rest of the Dutch Shakspeares. Ibsen or a skirt dance is what goes nowadays. There is a slight tendency to clearness in your style, which must be remedied if you wish to be a really great modern dramatist. And your play is not really vicious enough: the wife merely gives her husband an opiate while she escapes with her lover, instead of being driven by an imperative fate to give him about a quart of corrosive sublimate. But these are minor faults in a work of great villany, obscurity, and prolixity, which I hope to have the privilege of presenting. Yours truly, M. SAVARY, _Manager of the Gaieté Theatre_. Fontaine capered about gleefully, while Marsac read this letter, and then handed him another note which seemed to give him almost equal pleasure. It was from a picture-dealer, and briefly announced that an offer of a thousand francs had been made for “A Rough Sea,” and he hesitated about taking it: there was a price marked on the picture,--fifty something; it couldn’t be fifty francs! “But it was fifty francs, all the same,” cried Marsac; “and a thousand francs! Good heavens! We shall be as rich as the Rothschilds, and we shall be able to get away from these quarters and that dreadful woman downstairs, and I shall marry you to Claire Duval!” Fontaine’s reply to this was humming a little song with a refrain, “Claire, I love thee!” which presently made him sigh and look very gloomy. Marsac, who knew what turn his thoughts were taking, said slyly,-- “I met old Duval to-day.”