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Updated: May 28, 2025
A few empty ravings and common-place displays of terror, have gained for Crebillon the appellation of the terrible, which affords us a standard for judging of the barbarous and affected taste of the age, and the infinite distance from nature and truth to which it had fallen. It is pretty much the same as, in painting, to give the appellation of the majestic to Coypel.
"Do you remember any of your version of the Radamiste?" "I remember it all." "You have a wonderful memory; I should be glad to hear it." I began to recite the same scene that I had recited to Crebillon ten years before, and I thought M. de Voltaire listened with pleasure. "It doesn't strike one as at all harsh," said he. This was the highest praise he would give me.
Crébillon obtained permission from the French Academy to make his reception discourse in verse. At the moment when that poet, then almost sixty years of age, said, speaking of himself, "No gall has ever poisoned my pen," the hall reëchoed with approbation.
"No, for philosophers and courtiers are as widely different as light and darkness; but there are some men of intelligence who champ the bit from motives of ambition and interest." I found the amiable actress in good company. She introduced me to all her guests, and gave me some particulars respecting every one of them. The name of Crebillon struck my ear. "What, sir!"
We sat down to supper, and, being asked what I had already seen in Paris, I related everything I had done, omitting only my conversation with Patu. After I had spoken for a long time, Crebillon, who had evidently observed better than anyone else the road I had chosen in order to learn the good as well as the bad qualities by his countrymen, said to me,
Some he has made tribunes, prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his Ministers in foreign countries, and on those to whom he has not yet been able to given places, he bestows much greater pensions than any former Sovereign of this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a De Crebillon, a D' Alembert, a Marmontel, and other heroes of our literature and honours to our nation.
Racine, it is said, might have rivalled Moliere in comedy; but he gave up the cultivation of his comic talents to devote himself wholly to the tragic Muse. If, as the French tell us, he in consequence attained to the perfection of tragic composition, this was better than writing comedies as well as Moliere and tragedies as well as Crebillon.
Silvia was delighted to see the pleasure enjoyed by Crebillon in hearing, at the age of eighty, his own lines in a language which he knew thoroughly and loved as much as his own. He himself recited the same passage in French, and politely pointed out the parts in which he thought that I had improved on the original. I thanked him, but I was not deceived by his compliment.
Crebillon mentioned likewise his tragedy of Catilina, and he told me that, in his opinion, it was the most deficient of his works, but that he never would have consented, even to make a good tragedy, to represent Caesar as a young man, because he would in that case have made the public laugh, as they would do if Madea were to appear previous to her acquaintances with Jason.
One has all the advantages of variety, and change of incident and scenery, without any exertion; all the lazy pleasures for such they must be called of boat life, without any of the monotony which makes a long sea voyage so unendurable. I think it was Gray who said that his idea of paradise was "To lie on a sofa and read eternally new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon."
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