h the
author's friends: on the fourth a less partial public hissed to that
degree that the curtain was dropped, and thenceforward each night was
stormier until the play was withdrawn. Hugo could not bring himself to
allow that he had been hissed, and, being behind the scenes, said to the
actors, with the fatal sibilation whistling through the house, "They are
interrupting my play" (_On trouble ma piece_); which became a byword
with these wicked wits. Sainte-Beuve, with his infallible instinct of
wherein dwelt the vital greatness or defect of a production,
characterizes the piece as an exaggeration. He admits that it has
talent, especially in the preface, but adds, "Hugo sees all things
larger than life: they look black to him--in _Ruy Blas_ they looked red.
But there is grandeur in the _Burgraves_: he alone, or Chateaubriand,
could have written the introduction.... The banks of the Rhine are not
so lofty and thunder-riven as he makes out, nor is Thessaly so black,
nor Notre Dame so enormous, but more elegant, as may be seen from the
pavement. But this is the defect of his eye."

Amidst these theatrical diversions the chronicler alludes to the
fashionable preaching which occupied the gay world at hours when
playhouses and drawing-rooms were not open. There was a religious
revival going on in Paris almost equal to that which Moody and Sankey
have produced here. "During Passion Week" (1843) "the crowd in all the
churches, but at Notre Dame particularly, was prodigious. M. de Ravignan
preached three times a day--at one o'clock for the women of the gay
world, in the evening for the men, at other hours for the workingmen. He
adapted his sermons to the different classes: to the women of the world
he spoke as a man who knows the world and has belonged to it. They
rushed, they crowded, they wept. I do not know how many communicants
there were at Easter, but I believe the figure has not been so high for
fifty years." At Advent of the same year the same scenes were repeated,
with the Abbe Lacordaire in the pulpit. This excitement, and the debates
in the Chamber on the subject of the theological lectures at the
Sorbonne and College of France, call forth some excellent pages
regarding the condition of Catholicism in France and the Gallican
Church, and a brief, rapid review of the causes of the decline of the
latter, which Sainte-Beuve asserts (more than thirty years ago) to be
defunct. "Gallicanism, the noblest child of Catholicism,