would mention to-day but for his signature. The date was 1845. and the author was then twenty-one. Other works by him were published at various times in the Journal des Demoiselles.

"I was," he has said, "the careless, lazy, and spoilt child of all my father's friends. I believed in the eternity of youth, of strength, of joy. I spent the whole day laughing, the whole night sleeping. unless I had some reason for writing verses.”

About 1846 he set resolutely to work. He turned to novel-writing, which seemed to him to offer greater facilities for reaching the public and greater chances of immediate income than dramatic composition. Only two of his novels have survived: 'La Dame aux Camélias' ('Camille: 1848), because from this book came the immortal drama by the same title; and The Clémenceau Case,' because the author wrote it when he was in complete possession of his talent, and because moreover it is a first-rate work.

It was in 1852 that the Vaudeville Theatre gave the first performance of Camille,' the fortune of which was to be so extraordinary. For two or three years the play had been tossed from theatre to theatre. Nobody wanted it. To the ideas of the time it seemed simply shocking, and the play was still forbidden in London after its performances in France were numbered by the hundreds.

There is this special trait in 'Camille'-it was a work all instinct with the spirit of youth. Dumas twenty years later sadly said: "I might perhaps make another 'Demi-Monde'; I could not make another Camille.'» There existed, indeed, other works which have all the fire and charm of the twentieth year. 'Polyeucte' is Corneille's masterpiece; his 'Cid' breathes the spirit of youth: Corneille at forty could not have written the 'Cid.' Racine's first play is 'Andromaque': Beaumarchais's is the 'Barber of Seville'; Rossini, when young, enlivened it with his light and sparkling airs. Fifteen years later he himself wrote his 'William Tell,' a higher work, but a work which was not young.

If the theatrical managers had recoiled from 'Camille' in spite of the great names that recommended it, it is because it was cut after a pattern to which neither they nor the public were accustomed; it is because it contained the germ of a whole dramatic revolution. Now, the author was not a theatrical revolutionist. He had not said to himself, "I am going to throw down the old fabric of the drama, and erect a new one on its ruins." To tell the truth, he had no idea of what he was doing. He had witnessed a love drama. He had thrown it still throbbing upon the stage, without any regard for the dramatic conventions which were then imposed upon playwrights, and which were almost accepted as laws. He had simply depicted what he had seen. All the managers, attached as they were to the