“My dear friend, You must pardon me the liberty of addressing you when I have not the honour of your personal acquaintance, but your latest tragedy, Athalie shows, does it not, that you have made the most thorough study of my own modest works. You have not only put poetry in the mouths of the protagonists, or principal persons of the drama, but you have written other, and, let me tell you without flattery, charming verses for the choruses, a feature which was not too bad, according to all one hears, in Greek Tragedy, but is a complete novelty in France. Nay more, your talent always so fluent, so finished, so winning, so fine, so delicate, has here acquired an energy on which I congratulate you. Athalie, Joad—these are figures which your rival Corneille could have wrought no better. The characters are virile, the plot simple and strong. You have given us a tragedy in which love is not the keynote, and on this I must offer you my sincerest compliments. The most familiar proverbs are not always the truest. I will give you an example:
‘This passion treat, which makes the poet’s art
Fly, as on wings, straight to the listener’s heart.’You have shown us that the religious sentiment in which your choruses are steeped is no less capable of moving us. The general public may have been puzzled at first, but those who are best qualified to judge must give you your due. I have felt myself impelled to offer you all my congratulations, to which I would add, my dear brother poet, an expression of my very highest esteem.”
Albertine’s eyes, while she was reading this to us, had not ceased to sparkle. “Really, you’d think she must have cribbed it somewhere!” she exclaimed, as she reached the end. “I should never have believed that Gisèle could hatch out anything like as good! And the poetry she brings in! Where on earth can she have got that from?” Albertine’s admiration, with a change, it is true, of object, but with no loss—an increase, rather—of intensity, combined with the closest attention to what was being said, continued to make her eyes “start from her head” all the time that Andrée (consulted as being the biggest of the band and more knowledgeable than the others) first of all spoke of Gisèle’s essay with a certain irony, then with a levity of tone which failed to conceal her underlying seriousness proceeded to reconstruct the letter in her own way. “It is not badly done,” she told Albertine, “but if I were you and had the same subject set me, which is quite likely, as they do very often set that, I shouldn’t do it in that way. This is how I would tackle it. Well, first of all, if I had been Gisèle, I should not have let myself get tied up, I should have begun by making a rough sketch of what I was going to write on a separate piece of paper. On the top line I should state the question and give an account of the subject, then the general ideas to be worked into the development. After that, appreciation, style, conclusion. In that way, with a summary to refer to, you know where you are. But at the very start, where she begins her account of the subject, or, if you like, Titine, since it’s a letter we’re speaking of, where she comes to the matter, Gisèle has gone off the rails altogether. Writing to a person of the seventeenth century, Sophocles ought never to have said, ‘My dear friend,’ ” “Why, of course, she ought to have said, ‘My dear Racine,’ ” came impetuously from Albertine. “That would have been much better.” “No,” replied Andrée, with a trace of mockery in her tone, “She ought to have put ‘Sir.’ In the same way, to end up, she ought to have thought of something like, ‘Suffer me, Sir,’ (at the very most, ‘Dear Sir’) to inform you of the sense of high esteem with which I have the honour to be your servant.’ Then again, Gisèle says that the choruses in Athalie are a novelty. She is forgetting Esther, and two tragedies that are not much read now but happen to have been analysed this year by the Professor himself, so that you need only mention them, since he’s got them on the brain, and you’re bound to pass. I mean Les Juives, by Robert Garnier, and Montchrestien’s L’Aman.” Andrée quoted these titles without managing quite to conceal a secret sense of benevolent superiority, which found expression in a smile, quite a delightful smile, for that matter. Albertine could contain herself no longer. “Andrée, you really are a perfect marvel,” she cried. “You must write down those names for me. Just fancy, what luck it would be if I got on to that, even in the oral, I should bring them in at once and make a colossal impression.” But in the days that followed, every time that Albertine begged Andrée just to tell her again the names of those two plays so that she might write them down, her bluestocking friend seemed most unfortunately to have forgotten them, and left her none the wiser. “And another thing,” Andrée went on with the faintest note in her voice of scorn for companions so much younger than herself, though she relished their admiration and attached to the manner in which she herself would have composed the essay a greater importance than she wanted us to think, “Sophocles in the Shades must be kept well-informed of all that goes on. He must know, therefore, that it was not before the general public but before the King’s Majesty and a few privileged courtiers that Athalie
