The minister yielded.  The Gymnase was saved.  It kept its company, its repertory; it gained the right to give new pieces.  From the first days of September, 1824, it took the name of Madame the Duchess of Berry.  After the death of Louis XVIII., the 16th of that month, the Duchess of Angouleme having replaced her title of Madame by that of Dauphiness, and the Duchess of Berry taking the former, the Gymnase was called the Theatre de Madame.

The programme of the Gymnase was constantly being renewed.  Scribe, whose verve was inexhaustible, wrote for this theatre alone nearly one hundred and fifty pieces.  It is true that he had collaborators,—­Germain Delavigne, Dupin, Melesville, Brazier, Varner, Carmouche, Bayard, etc.  It was to them that he wrote, in the dedication of the edition of his works:—­

“To my collaborators:  My dear friends, I have often been reproached for the number of my collaborators; for myself, who am happy to count among them only friends, I regret, on the contrary, that I have not more of them.  I am often asked why I have not worked alone.  To this I will reply that I have probably neither the wit nor the talent for that; but if I had had them I should still have preferred our literary fraternity and alliance.  The few works I have produced alone have been to me a labor; those I have produced with you have been a pleasure.”

Eugene Scribe was born December 25, 1791, at Paris, Rue Saint-Denis, near the Marche des Innocents.  His father, whom he lost early, kept a silk store, at the sign of the Chat Noir, where he had made a considerable fortune.  Eugene commenced his career as a dramatic writer in 1811.  From that time to his death (February 20, 1861), he composed alone, or with associates, and had represented on the various stages of Paris, more than four hundred plays.  M. Vitel said, at the reception of M. Octave Feuillet, at the French Academy, March 26, 1863:—­

“There was in Scribe a powerful and truly superior faculty, that assured to him and explained to me his supremacy in the theatre of his day.  It was a gift of dramatic invention that perhaps no one before him has possessed; the gift of discovering at every step, almost apropos of nothing, theatrical combinations of a novel and striking effect; and of discovering them, not in the germ only, or barely sketched, but in relief, in action, and already on the stage.  In the time needed by his confreres to prepare a plot, he would finish four, and he never secured this prodigious fecundity at the expense of originality.  It is in no commonplace mould that his creations are cast.  There is not one of his works that has not at least its grain of novelty.”

On his part, M. Octave Feuillet, a master in things theatrical, said in his reception discourse:—­

“One of the most difficult arts in the domain of literary invention, is that of charming the imagination without unsettling it, of touching the heart without troubling it, of amusing men without corrupting them; this was the supreme art of Scribe.”