In the same year, 1689, one Francois Procope, a Sicilian, conceived the happy idea of hiring a house just opposite the new theatre, and there opening a public refreshment-room, which at once became famous, not only for the excellence of its coffee (then newly introduced into France), but also for being the favorite resort of all the wits, dramatists, and beaux of that brilliant time.  Here the latest epigrams were circulated, the newest scandals discussed, the bitterest literary cabals set on foot.  Here Jean Jacques brooded over his chocolate; and Voltaire drank his mixed with coffee; and Dorat wrote his love-letters to Mademoiselle Saunier; and Marmontel wrote praises of Mademoiselle Clairon; and the Marquis de Bievre made puns innumerable; and Duclos and Mercier wrote satires, now almost forgotten; and Piron recited those verses which are at once his shame and his fame; and the Chevalier de St. Georges gave fencing lessons to his literary friends; and Lamothe, Freron, D’Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, and all that wonderful company of wits, philosophers, encyclopaedists, and poets, that lit up as with a dying glory the last decades of the old regime, met daily, nightly, to write, to recite, to squabble, to lampoon, and some times to fight.

The year 1770 beheld, in the closing of the Theatre Francais, the extinction of a great power in the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres—­for it was not, in fact, till the theatre was no more a theatre that the street changed its name, and became the Rue de L’Ancienne Comedie.  A new house (to be on first opening invested with the time-honored title of Theatre Francais, but afterwards to be known as the Odeon) was now in progress of erection in the close neighborhood of the Luxembourg.  The actors, meanwhile, repaired to the little theatre of the Tuilleries.  At length, in 1782,[2] the Rue de L’Ancienne Comedie was one evening awakened from its two years’ lethargy by the echo of many footfalls, the glare of many flambeaux, and the rattle of many wheels; for all Paris, all the wits and critics of the Cafe Procope, all the fair shepherdesses and all the beaux seigneurs of the court of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI., were hastening on foot, in chairs, and in chariots, to the opening of the new house and the performance of a new play!  And what a play!  Surely, not to consider it too curiously, a play which struck, however sportively, the key-note of the coming Revolution;—­a play which, for the first time, displayed society literally in a state of bouleversement;—­a play in which the greed of the courtier, the venality of the judge, the empty glitter of the crown, were openly held up to scorn;—­a play in which all the wit, audacity, and success are on the side of the canaille;—­a play in which a lady’s-maid is the heroine, and a valet canes his master, and a great nobleman is tricked, outwitted, and covered with ridicule!

[2] 1782 is the date given by M. Hippolyte Lucas.  Sainte-Beuve places it two years later.