CHAPTER XIII

A FIRST REPRESENTATION

The Comédie Française had announced for the present evening the first performance of "_The Seducer_," a five-act comedy in verse. This piece was the first literary effort of the Vicomte de Gercourt. Still extremely young and quite the fashion, possessed of a highly prepossessing and agreeable person, he justly passed in the world for a man of talent, an agreeable and entertaining companion, and a person of unquestioned honour in every transaction in which he was concerned. Consequently the first representation of his comedy had attracted all the higher circles of Paris, to which he belonged.

Thanks to his natural amiability and known benevolence of disposition, added to some severe reverses of fortune he had sustained, envy and malice were content to let him alone; and for some time M. de Gercourt possessed not a single enemy, but unhappily his literary ambition (the only really noble, great, and praiseworthy ambition a man can indulge in) created for him, after a time, a host of petty and hostile jealousies. Some friends still remained firm and unaltered; but only a fall, at once striking and humiliating, from the high position he then occupied, could have restored him to universal good-will. The majority of the literati of the time viewed with angry mistrust the introduction of this fresh pretender within the arena of their own triumphs. For ourselves, we have never been able to comprehend the bitter feeling let loose upon a man, by all the public writers of the day, against whom nothing more injurious could be adduced, than that he sought to improve and employ his leisure hours by the ennobling study of literature in general.

The reader will now find himself introduced into several boxes of the Comédie Française, where he will meet many of the personages of our history, attracted, by universal curiosity, to witness the first representation of this dramatic effort.