A FIRST REPRESENTATION
The Comédie Française had announced for the present evening the first
performance of "_The Seducer_," a five-act comedy in verse. This piece
was the first literary effort of the Vicomte de Gercourt. Still
extremely young and quite the fashion, possessed of a highly
prepossessing and agreeable person, he justly passed in the world for a
man of talent, an agreeable and entertaining companion, and a person of
unquestioned honour in every transaction in which he was concerned.
Consequently the first representation of his comedy had attracted all
the higher circles of Paris, to which he belonged.
Thanks to his natural amiability and known benevolence of disposition,
added to some severe reverses of fortune he had sustained, envy and
malice were content to let him alone; and for some time M. de Gercourt
possessed not a single enemy, but unhappily his literary ambition (the
only really noble, great, and praiseworthy ambition a man can indulge
in) created for him, after a time, a host of petty and hostile
jealousies. Some friends still remained firm and unaltered; but only a
fall, at once striking and humiliating, from the high position he then
occupied, could have restored him to universal good-will. The majority
of the literati of the time viewed with angry mistrust the introduction
of this fresh pretender within the arena of their own triumphs. For
ourselves, we have never been able to comprehend the bitter feeling let
loose upon a man, by all the public writers of the day, against whom
nothing more injurious could be adduced, than that he sought to improve
and employ his leisure hours by the ennobling study of literature in
general.
The reader will now find himself introduced into several boxes of the
Comédie Française, where he will meet many of the personages of our
history, attracted, by universal curiosity, to witness the first
representation of this dramatic effort.