which succeeded this announcement was almost frightful, and while the
scene was at its height, the three friends with great difficulty managed
to extricate themselves from the multitude which wedged up the lobbies,
and to make their escape.

"A friend of the people!" cried Debray, bitterly, as his coupe,
containing himself and companions, drove off to Very's. "From such
friends let the people be saved, and they may save themselves from their
foes."

"And the play, what think you of that?" cried Beauchamp.

"That it is a most able and abominable production, eminently calculated
to cause exactly the evils which we have this night perceived--to excite
and rouse the worst passions of the mob, and render the masses
dissatisfied with their inevitable and irredeemable lot, and as
dangerous as wild beasts to all whose lot is more favored."

"Man has rights as man, and men in masses have rights, and one of those
rights is to know actually what those rights are," said Beauchamp. "The
most melancholy feature in the oppression of man is his ignorance that
he is oppressed. Enlighten him as to those rights, elevate his mind to
appreciate and value them, and then counsel him firmly and resolutely to
demand those rights, and quietly and wisely to obtain them."

"Aye! but will he obey such counsel?" exclaimed Chateau-Renaud. "Will
not the result of such enlightenment and excitement prove, as it ever
has proved, anarchy, revolution, guilt, blood? Who shall restrain the
monster once lashed into madness?"

"But you can surely perceive no such design in this play, and no such
effect," rejoined Beauchamp.

"In the abstract," replied the Count, "this production is
unexceptionable--most beautiful, yet most powerful. How it could have
been the work of an unpracticed pen, embodying as it does passages of
which the first dramatists of the romantic school might be proud, I
cannot imagine. Besides, there seems familiar acquaintance with stage
effect and the way in which it is produced. But that might have been,
and probably was, the result of some professional player's suggestions."

"And, then, the profound knowledge of the human heart evinced--its
passions, motives and principles of action," added the journalist.
"There seems an individuality, a personality in the production, which
compels the idea that the author is himself the hero, that he has
himself experienced the evils he so vividly portrays, that the drama is
at once the effusi