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Updated: June 3, 2025
Ducis was at the height of his triumph; he and Delille were seated side by side in academic glory, which is not unlike theatrical glory. Ducis had succeeded in doing something with Shakespeare; he had made him possible; he had extracted some "tragedies" from him; Ducis impressed one as being a man who could chisel an Apollo out of Moloch.
We were not fortunate enough to see Talma in Ducis' play of Macbeth, where the difference between the French and English stage in this particular is very strongly illustrated; but from every thing we have, understood, of the wonderful impression which is produced, when he describes his interview with the weird sisters the terrors which accompanied their appearance, and the feelings which their predictions awakened, we are persuaded that the effect must be much finer than any thing which can result from the feeble attempt to represent all this to the eye.
Yes, here are the angels of Ducis in real flesh and blood. They revel in the wildest eccentricities with none to molest or make afraid, always excepting the black demons from the spiritual world.
Chenedolle, whose verse Madame de Stael said to be as lofty as Lebanon, and whose fame is lilliputian to-day, was, with Ducis, the representative of their advance-guard. In painting, with Fragonard, Greuze and Gros, there was a greater stir of genius, yet without anything corresponding in the sister art.
Although the literature of France could boast of many men of great talent, such as La Harpe, who died during the Consulate, Ducis, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chenier, and Lemercier, yet they could not be compared with Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, and Cuvier, whose labours have so prodigiously extended the limits of human knowledge.
The ease and simplicity of all his ways contrasted so well with the splendid imagination with which Heaven had gifted him that I have never known a more lovable man than this excellent Ducis. The sole regret of his friends was that they were unable to induce him to settle in Paris.
The principal of these authors were LA HARPE, DUCIS, and CHENIER. The last, who, besides, is famous as member of the National Convention and other Legislative Assemblies, composed the tragedy of Charles Neuf, in which Madame VESTRIS, playing the part of Catherine de Medicis, affected, I am told, to advance her under-lip, a l'Autrichienne, in order to occasion comparisons injurious to the ill-fated Marie-Antoinette.
At first she was little thought of; but there came a time when she astonished both her teachers and her companions by a recital which she gave in public. The part was the narrative of Salema in the "Abufar" of Ducis. It describes the agony of a mother who gives birth to a child while dying of thirst amid the desert sands.
There was a brief pause, during which Louis XVIII. wrote, in a hand as small as possible, another note on the margin of his Horace, and then looking at the duke with the air of a man who thinks he has an idea of his own, while he is only commenting upon the idea of another, said, "Go on, my dear duke, go on I listen." "Mala ducis avi domum," continued Louis XVIII., still annotating.
Ducis, on his part, was not backward in returning the Consul's animosity, and I remember his writing some verses which were inexcusably violent, and overstepped all the bounds of truth. Bonaparte was so singular a composition of good and bad that to describe him as he was under one or other of these aspects would serve for panegyric or satire without any departure from truth.
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