d
beaux of that brilliant time. Here the latest epigrams were circulated,
the newest scandals discussed, the bitterest literary cabals set on
foot. Here Jean Jacques brooded over his chocolate; and Voltaire drank
his mixed with coffee; and Dorat wrote his love-letters to Mademoiselle
Saunier; and Marmontel wrote praises of Mademoiselle Clairon; and the
Marquis de Bievre made puns innumerable; and Duclos and Mercier wrote
satires, now almost forgotten; and Piron recited those verses which are
at once his shame and his fame; and the Chevalier de St. Georges gave
fencing lessons to his literary friends; and Lamothe, Freron,
D'Alembert, Diderot, Helvetius, and all that wonderful company of wits,
philosophers, encyclopaedists, and poets, that lit up as with a dying
glory the last decades of the old _regime_, met daily, nightly, to
write, to recite, to squabble, to lampoon, and some times to fight.

The year 1770 beheld, in the closing of the Theatre
Francais, the extinction of a great power in the Rue des
Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres--for it was not, in fact, till the theatre
was no more a theatre that the street changed its name, and became the
Rue de L'Ancienne Comedie. A new house (to be on first opening invested
with the time-honored title of Theatre Francais, but afterwards to be
known as the Odeon) was now in progress of erection in the close
neighborhood of the Luxembourg. The actors, meanwhile, repaired to the
little theatre of the Tuilleries. At length, in 1782,[2] the Rue de
L'Ancienne Comedie was one evening awakened from its two years' lethargy
by the echo of many footfalls, the glare of many flambeaux, and the
rattle of many wheels; for all Paris, all the wits and critics of the
Cafe Procope, all the fair shepherdesses and all the beaux seigneurs of
the court of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI., were hastening on foot, in
chairs, and in chariots, to the opening of the new house and the
performance of a new play! And what a play! Surely, not to consider it
too curiously, a play which struck, however sportively, the key-note of
the coming Revolution;--a play which, for the first time, displayed
society literally in a state of _bouleversement_;--a play in which the
greed of the courtier, the venality of the judge, the empty glitter of
the crown, were openly held up to scorn;--a play in which all the wit,
audacity, and success are on the side of the _canaille_;--a play in
which a lady's-maid is the heroine, and a va