Background In his preface to the play, the author notes that Triboulet "hates the king because he is king; hates the nobles because they are nobles and hates men because they don't all have a hump-back... he corrupts the king and brutalizes him, urging him on to tyranny, ignorance and vice, dragging him through the gentlemen's families, pointing out a woman to seduce, a sister to kidnap, a girl to dishonour...". As a victim of royal despotism, the character of the deformed Triboulet is a precursor of the disfigured Gwynplaine in Hugo's 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs (L'Homme qui rit); in Act 2 Scene 1, Triboulet says « Je suis l'homme qui rit, il est l'homme qui tue ». ("I am the man who laughs, he [Saltabadil] is the man who kills.") While it depicts the escapades of Francis I of France, censors of the time believed that the play also contained insulting references to King Louis-Philippe and a ministerial decree banned it after one performance. The lawsuit that Hugo brought to permit further performances of the play propelled him into celebrity as a defender of freedom of speech in France, which had been liberalized by the 'Charte-Vérité' of 1830. He lost the suit, however, was forced to pay costs and the play was banned for another 50 years. The second performance of Le roi s'amuse took place at the Comédie-Française on the play's 50th anniversary, with Mounet-Sully as François 1er, Got as Triboulet and Julia Bartet as his daughter Blanche. There were 19 performances that year and 28 more in 1883. The reviewer in Les Annales noted the irony of the fact that the opera Rigoletto, based so closely on the play, had been performed at two theatres in Paris since 1857 while the play had been forbidden. Léo Delibes wrote incidental music for these performances, consisting of dance music for orchestra in the first act ('Six airs de danse dans le style ancien'), and an old song with mandolin accompaniment ('Quand Bourbon vit Marseille') for De Pienne and Triboulet in the third act. A revival with Roland Bertin (Triboulet) directed by Jean-Luc Boutté was mounted at the Comédie-Française in their 1991–1992 season. Adaptations Giuseppe Verdi's 1851 opera Rigoletto is based on Hugo's play, which the librettist Piave followed closely in his Italian translation. Censorship by the Austrian authorities in Venice led them to move the action from