Either the committee feared
the expense which the representation would have entailed, or else the
elder Dumas, who was one of their most successful suppliers of dramas,
and had recently fallen out with them, must have made up the quarrel
just before Balzac's comedy was read. Whatever the reason was, the
rejection of the piece grievously affected the novelist, who, besides
losing a great deal of valuable time, had spent money to no purpose in
having his comedy printed.
It must be acknowledged that, in dramatic composition, whatever Balzac
had so far done by himself was done grudgingly, and, when possible,
shifted on to other shoulders. Gozlan relates that Lassailly, who went
to Les Jardies and lived there for some little time as a paid
secretary, would be rung up at night, when his employer usually
worked--rung up not once nor twice, but several times, to hear himself
asked whether, in his waking or his dreaming, he had hatched any good
plan; and poor Lassailly would have sorrowfully to avow that his brain
had conceived nothing of any importance in the way of drama.
How Harel, the managing director of the Porte-Saint-Martin, was
brought to give in the same twelve-month to the rejected of the
Renaissance a firm promise that anything he liked to do for that
theatre should be acted is an impenetrable mystery.
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