illusion of the senses, founded on facts admitted by the
understanding, and presented in real life, past or present.
When you give yourself up to believe that Talma was Nero, or
Lafont Britannicus, or that the Rue Richelieu is the palace of
the Caesars, you admit all that at first appears to outrage
possibility. Starting, then, from that point, I see no
absurdity in the tragedy, which my friend Albert de S---- says
he has written for the express purpose of trying how far the
neglect of the unities may be carried. The title and subject of
this piece is "the Creation," beginning from Chaos (and what
scenery and machinery it will admit!) and ending with the
French revolution; the scene, infinite space; and the time,
according to the Mosaic account, some 6000 years.'

"'And the protagonist, Monsieur? Surely you don't mean to
revive the allegorical personages in the mysteries of the
middle ages?'

"'_Ah ca! pour le protagoniste, c'est le diable._ He is the
only contemporaneous person in the universe that we know of,
whom in these days of _cagoterie_ we can venture to bring on
the stage, and who could be perpetually before the scene, as a
protagonist should be. He is particularly suited, by our
received ideas of his energy and restlessness, for the
principal character. The devil of the German patriarch's
_Faust_ is, after all, but a profligate casuist; and the high
poetical tone of sublimity of Milton's Satan is no less to be
avoided in a delineation that has truth and nature for its
inspiration. In short, the devil, the true romantic devil, must
speak, as the devil would naturally speak, under the various
circumstances in which his immortal ambition and ceaseless
malignity may place him. In the first act, he should assume the
tone of the fallen hero, which would by no means become him
when in corporal possession of a Jewish epileptic, and
bargaining for his _pis aller_ in a herd of swine. Then again,
as a leader of the army of St. Dominick, he should have a
fiercer tone of bigotry, and less political _finesse_, than as
a privy councillor in the cabinet of the Cardinal de Richelieu.
At the end of the fourth act, as a guest at the table of Baron
Holbach, he may even be witty; while as a minister of police,
he should be precisely the