the people who saw his plays missed what they were accustomed to see: a well-defined story.

What success would have attended his innovations in another country it is hard to say; what success will attend him if he perseveres, seems easier to predict. The past five years have witnessed a profound change in French thought and art, and perhaps Romain Rolland will once more find his faith justified in a new France where the people shall have a theater of their own. Meantime, his ideas have spread to other lands and there borne the fruit he had hoped would flourish in his own beloved France.

BARRETT H. CLARK.

THE FOURTEENTH OF JULY

(LE 14 JUILLET)

A Play in Three Acts

Pour qu'une nation soit libre.
il suffit qu'elle le veuille.
LA FAYETTE.
11th July. 1789.

[Le 14 Juillet was produced in Paris in 1902.]

Dedicated to the People of Paris.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The author has sought moral truth in this play rather than anecdotic exactitude. He has seen fit to take greater liberty with the action, which is developed in the poetry of popular legend, than in Danton. In that play, he applied himself to the development of the psychology of certain characters, for the whole drama is concentrated in the souls of three or four great men. It is otherwise with the present work: individuals disappear in the great ocean of the people. If you wish to represent a tempest, you must not describe each wave, but a whole angry sea: an exact rendering of details is much less important than the passionate sweeping truth of the whole. There is something false and insulting to the intelligence in the disproportionate place given nowadays to historic anecdotes, tiny incidents, and the dust shaken out of the pages of history, all of which is emphasized at the expense of the human side. It is my ideal to resuscitate the forces of the past, reveal once more the springs of action, and not to offer a cold and denatured miniature to the curious who care more for externals than for the soul of the hero. I have endeavored to make live again the heroism and the faith of the nation in the throes of the Revolution during the Republican epoch, in order that we, a nation of greater maturity and more than ever conscious of the great destiny that awaits us, may continue and finish the work interrupted in 1794. If we are strong enough to realize this, we are strong enough to do our best toward the accomplishment of our task. The end of art is not dreams, but life. Action should spring from the spectacle of action.

June, 1901.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

The People: French Guards, Swiss Guards, Pensioners, Carpenters, Workingmen, Children, etc.

SCENE: Paris from the 12th to the 14th July, 1789.

Act I. At the Palais-Royal, Sunday morning, 12th July.

Act II. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Monday night and Tuesday morning, 13th-14th July.

Act III. The Bastille, Tuesday the 14th July, from four to seven P.M.

ACT I

[The Garden of the Palais-Royal, seen from the Cafe de Foy. It is Sunday the 12th of July, 1789. At the back is the "Cirque"; at the right, a fountain, playing. Between the "Cirque" and the promenades running round the Palais-Royal is a row of trees. The shopkeepers stand before their shops, which are hung with patriotic emblems: "At the Sign of the Great Necker," "At the Sign of the National Assembly," etc. Women, with breasts, shoulders, and arms bare, and wearing immense bouquets, walk about among the crowd displaying their charms. Newsdealers cry out the news; gambling-house keepers appear here and there in dressing-gowns, escorted by men armed with clubs; swindlers brazenly slip between groups of people with their folding tabourets, stop for an instant, display a trick, bring out sacks of silver, then quickly disappear into the surging mass. The crowds are nervously shifting about, sitting at the cafes, jumping up and around, and ready to start at the least disturbance. The crowds gradually increase up to the end of the act, until there is so little room left that the more venturesome climb into the trees. People of all classes are present: starving vagabonds, workingmen, bourgeois, aristocrats, soldiers? priests, women, and children, some of whom play about between the legs of the others.]

NEWS-CRIERS. Great plot discovered! Famine, famine is at hand! The murderers have come!

THE CROWD [calling to the news-criers]. Here! Sst!

A MAN OF THE PEOPLE [anxiously, to a bourgeois, who is reading]. Well?

THE BOURGEOIS. My good fellow, they are coming! They're coming! The Germans, the Swiss Guards! Paris is surrounded! They'll be here any minute!

THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE. The King won't let them.

A VAGABOND. The King? He's with them at the camp of Sablons, surrounded by Germans.

THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE. The King is a Frenchman.

THE BOURGEOIS. The King, yes, but not the Queen. The Austrian woman hates us. Her brigand Marshal de Broglie has sworn to raze Paris to the ground. We are caught between the cannon of the Bastille and the troops of the Champ de Mars.

A STUDENT. They won't make a move. Monsieur Necker is at Versailles; he will take care of us.

THE BOURGEOIS. Yes, so long as he remains Minister, we must not lose our faith in him.

THE VAGABOND. But who says he still is? They've dismissed him.