My anxiety to bring my readers along, without interruption, to the moment when my lot and that of my mother was settled, by my being placed on the staff as a copying-clerk at twelve hundred francs, has caused me to pass over a host of events of far greater interest, no doubt, to strangers, than those I have related, but whichif egotism may be permitted mein my own eyes, and to my mind, should take a secondary place.
The year 1823, which we might style the "year of trials," opened by the trial of Potier on 7 January. Those who never saw Potier can form no conception of the influence this great comedian, who was much admired by Talma, had on the public; yet the damages and compensation that M. Serres, the manager of the Porte-Sainte-Martin, demanded from him, may give some idea of the value that was put upon him. One morning Potier, faithful, as M. Étienne would have said, to his "first loves", took it into his head to return to the Variétés, a project which he carried out, it appears, forgetting to ask M. Serres to cancel his engagement before he left.
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