Sardou's Cleopatra — page 211: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

196 SARDOU’S CLEOPATRA. ° fleet, that hour before he had fied, leaving his astounded enemy the master of the seas. Would that horrible moment never be effaced? Was ~- there no possible way to recapture the past? He would give his life and his thirty years of glory to tear the record of that day from the pages of history. Fame had been his most cherished dream, the fame that would live beyond the tomb; to be an immortal example for future ages, to have in his country a column of victory or a tem- ple dedicated to him to reach an unknown sum- mit on the ladder of glory. In his misery, he remembered how his mother, when he was a child, had related to him the triumphant exploits of Hercules, and how his bosom had swelled with pride, hope, and envy, as she said to him: “Such was your ancestor, and you will equal him !” : Who would then have said that that mother had given birth to a coward, and that son, the object of so much tender care, was destined one day to fly before the enemy? Antony’s fall had made Cesar great. Czeesar, a warrior who knew not how to wield his sword, nor to rally with his" voice a wavering phalanx. At Philippi he said that he was ill; he was afraid. And it was such cComicbooks rel)