In the stormy year of 1830, when the July Revolution made an end for ever of the Bourbon cause in Paris, the Comedie Francaise again became a scene of fierce strife. _Hernani_, a drama in verse, had been accepted from the pen of Victor Hugo, the brilliant and exuberant master of the new Romantic school of poets who had determined to emancipate themselves from the traditions, long since hardened into dogmas, of the great dramatists of the siecle de Louis Quatorze. On the night of the first performance each side--Romanticists and Classicists--had packed the theatre with partisans. 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 deja lui? C'est bien a l'escalier Derobe--" The last word had not passed the actress' 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 verse. The Romanticists, led by Theophile Gautier, answered in withering blasphemies; the Classicists began to "... prove their doctrine orthodox By apostolic blows and knocks," and the pit became a pandemonium of warring factions. Night after night the literary sects renewed their fights, and the representations, as Hugo said, resembled battles rather than performances. The year 1830 was the '93 of the classic drama, but the passions it evoked have long since been calmed and _Hernani_ and _Le Roi s'Amuse_, the latter suppressed by Louis Philippe after its first appearance, have taken their places in the classic repertory of the Francais beside the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. At No. 161 Rue St. Honore, now Cafe de la Regence, beloved of chess players, is the site of the Porte St. Honore of the Charles V. wall before which Joan of Arc was wounded at the Siege of Paris in 1429. The old chess-players' temple where Diderot loved to watch the matches; where the author of _Gil Blas_ beheld in a vast and brilliantly lighted salon, a score of silent and grave _pousseurs de bois_ (wood-shovers) surrounded by crowds of spectators amid a silence so profound that the movement of the pieces alone could be heard; where Voltaire and D' Alembert were often seen; where Jean Jacques Rousseau, dressed as an Armenian, drew such crowds that the proprietor was forced to seek police protection; where Robespierre loved to play a cautious game and the young and impecunious Napoleon Bonaparte, an impatient player and bad loser, waited on fortune; where strangers from all corners of the earth congregated as in an arena where victory was esteemed final and complete; where Poles, Turks, Moors and Hindoos in their picturesque garbs made a scene unparalleled even at the Rialto of Venice; where on Sunday afternoons a seat was worth a monarch's ransom--this classic Cafe de la Regence which, until 1852, stood on the Place du Palais Royal, no longer exists.