Now we come to the history of all the disasters which happened at the acting of this tragedy.  “How can people complain that my piece is tedious, when, after the first act, they would never listen ten minutes to it?  Why did they attend to the first scenes, and even applaud one?  Let me not be told, because these were sublime, and commanded the respect of the cabal raised against it; because there are other scenes far more sublime in the piece, which they perpetually interrupted.  Will it be believed, that they pitched upon the scene of the sacrifice of Volgesie, as one of the most tedious?—­the scene of Volgesie, which is the finest in my piece; not a verse, not a word in it, can be omitted![172] Everything tends towards the catastrophe; and it reads in the closet as well as it would affect us on the stage.  I was not, however, astonished at this; what men hear, and do not understand, is always tedious; and it was recited in so shocking a tone by the actress, who, not having entirely recovered from a fit of illness, was flurried by the tumult of the audience.  She declaimed in a twanging tone like psalm-singing; so that the audience could not hear, among the fatiguing discordances (he means their own hissing), nor separate the thoughts and words from the full chant which accompanied them.  They objected perpetually to the use of the word Madame between two female rivals, as too comic; one of the pit, when an actress said Madame, cried out ‘Say Princesse!’ This disconcerted the actress.  They also objected to the words apropos and mal-apropos.  Yet, after all, how are there too many Madames in the piece, since they do not amount to forty-six in the course of forty-four scenes?  Of these, however, I have erased half.”

This historian of his own wrong-headedness proceeds, with all the simplicity of this narrative, to describe the hubbub.

“Thus it was impossible to connect what they were hearing with what they had heard.  In the short intervals of silence, the actors, who, during the tumult, forgot their characters, tried with difficulty to recover their conception.  The conspirators were prepared to a man; not only in their head, but some with written notes had their watchwords, to set their party a-going.  They seemed to act with the most extraordinary concert; they seemed to know the exact moment when they were to give the word, and drown, in their hurly-burly, the voice of the actor, who had a passionate part to declaim, and thus break the connexion between the speakers.  All this produced so complete an effect, that it seemed as if the actors themselves had been of the conspiracy, so wilful and so active was the execution of the plot.  It was particularly during the fifth and sixth acts that the cabal was most outrageous; they knew these were the most beautiful, and deserved particular attention.  Such a humming arose, that the actors seemed to have had their heads turned; some lost their voice, some