ng, and the curtain fell
amidst deafening applause. It redeemed the piece!

Next day Lireux made his appearance at Tortoni's in the afternoon, and,
as a matter of course, the production of the previous evening was
discussed.

"I cannot understand," said Roger de Beauvoir, "how a man with such
evident knowledge of stagecraft as the author displayed in that
denoument, could have perpetrated such an enormity as the whole of the
previous acts."

Lireux was fairly convulsed with laughter. "Do you really think that was
his own invention?" he asked.

"Of course I do," was the reply.

"Well, it is not. His denoument was a speech which would have taken
about twenty minutes, at the end of which the queen is tamely led off
between the soldiers. I know what would have been the result: the
students would have simply torn up the benches and Heaven knows what
else. You know that if the gas is left burning, if only a moment, after
twelve, there is an extra charge irrespective of the quantity consumed.
I looked at my watch when she began to speak her lines. It was exactly
thirteen minutes to twelve; she might have managed to get to the end by
twelve, but it was doubtful. What was not doubtful was the row that
would have ensued, and the time it would have taken me to cope with it.
My mind was made up there and then. I selected the biggest of the
supers, told him to go and fetch her, and you know the rest."

There were few theatrical managers in those days who escaped the
vigilance of Balzac. Among the many schemes he was for ever hatching for
benefiting mankind and making his own fortune, there was one which can
not be more fitly described than in the American term of "making a
corner"; only that particular "corner" was to be one in plays.

About two years before the advent of Lireux, and when the house at Ville
d'Avray, of which I have spoken elsewhere, was completed, a party of
literary men received an invitation to spend the Sunday there. It was
not an ordinary invitation, but a kind of circular-letter, the
postscriptum to which contained the following words: "M. de Balzac will
make an important communication." Leon Gozlan, Jules Sandeau, Louis
Desnoyers, Henri Monnier, and those familiar with Balzac's schemes, knew
pretty well what to expect; and when Lassailly, one of the four men
whose nose vied with the legendary one of Bouginier, confirmed their
apprehensions that it was a question of making their fortunes, they
resigned