"Now, what do you say to those lines of M. Dumas? 'I wrote to the young man, and the young man _never favoured me with an answer_!' This time it is the philosophy of _truthfulness,_ with a vengeance! Nobody would have believed it, if I had not held the _evidence_ and the _means_ of proving what I am stating! M. Dumas not having yielded to the request or to the summons that I sent him to stop the rehearsals of the play (which was the first, if not the second, of his _mistakes,_ from which he will never clear himself, because it proves his _complicity),_ and M. Harel threatening to play in spite of me--which, both morally and physically, he was capable of doing,--there was nothing else left for me to do but to let my drama be performed, and according to the _conditions_ stipulated in M. Dumas's letter, in which he stated that _his name would not be given,_ that I should be the _sole author,_ that he wished to _tender_ me a service and not to _sell_ it me.
"Very well, then, the day following the first performance, _asterisks_ appeared on the playbills _before_ my name, and now, M. Dumas wants to replace _my name_ by his: it will be seen what encroachments these were! This is not all. When it came to payment, they would not give me more than _one share._ Now, listen carefully: during the current April, the Commission of Authors had made an agreement with M. Harel, before the performance of my play, which stipulated for a fee of ten per cent, for the authors, in the performances _to come on_ at the Porte-Saint-Martin. I had, then, the right to the benefit of this agreement. M. Dumas enjoyed it, and more beside; he also received two and three hundred francs per night. What did they leave me? Forty-eight francs, the price of an old agreement! and M. Dumas took _half_ of it from me--that is the service he wished to _tender_ me, and not to _sell_!!!
"There was nothing for it but to go to law to protest against such deeds, as there is nothing but the police station against theft and pickpocketting. I therefore had recourse to the law courts.
"If more proof _still_ be needed, I have it at hand, drawn up and set forth in the legal deeds, _properly attested,_ which began the examination of this trial. But it would seem that the trial a little alarmed M. Dumas's public conscience, for he suggested to me to stop it by a compromise.