he immortal creation of a great poet. At that
time I was not sufficiently familiar with provincial art in England to
be able to picture a performance of Shakespeare except under conditions
such as prevail in the best of London theatres. I had read accounts,
however, of strolling companies and their doings, but I doubt whether
the humblest would have been guilty of such utter iconoclasm in the
spirit as well as in the letter as I witnessed that night. It was not
comic, it was absolutely painful. It was not the glazed calico doing
duty for brocade, that made me wince; it was not the anti-macassar
replacing lace that made me gasp for breath: it was the miserable
failure of those behind the footlights, as well as of those in front, to
grasp the meaning of the simplest line. They had been told that this
play was an indictment, not against a libertine king, but against
generations and generations of rulers to whom debauch was as the air
they breathed. And, in order to make the lesson more striking,
Saint-Vallier was represented as an old dotard, Triboulet as a pander,
the king as an amorous Bill Sykes, and Triboulet's daughter as an
hysterical young woman who virtually gloried in her dishonour. I had
seen "Orphee aux Enfers," "La Belle Helene," and "La Grande Duchesse;" I
had heard Schneider at her best and at her worst; I had heard women of
birth and breeding titter, and gentlemen roar, at allusions which would
make a London coalheaver blush;--I had never seen anything so downright
degrading as this performance. And when, at last, the _dramatis personae_
gathered round a bust of Hippocrates--the best substitute for one of
Victor Hugo they could find,--and one of them recited "Les Chatiments,"
I left, hoping that I should never see such an exhibition again. It was
one of the first deliberately planned lessons in "king-hatred" I had
heard. The disciples looked to me very promising, and the Commune, when
it came, was not such a surprise to me, after all. Before then, I had
come to the conclusion that the _barbarians_ outside the gates of Paris
were less to be feared than those inside--the former, at any rate,
believed in a chief; the motto of the others was, "Ni Dieu, ni maitre."

Meanwhile, the long winter nights have come. The stock of gas is pretty
well exhausted, or tantamount to it; wood, similar to that I have
described already, has risen to seven francs fifty centimes the
hundredweight. Beef and mutton have entirely disap