In the course of his extensive peregrinations around France over the years between 1787 and 1790, Arthur Young found little to delight him and much to dismay him. Agriculture – his principal concern – was in a piteous state, and the constitution-mongering during the early years of the Revolution boded ill; nevertheless, he never had anything but good to say about the Comédie-Française and the new theatre into which the company had moved a few years before, which occupied the site of the present-day Odéon theatre. The circular shape of the auditorium struck him as ideal, both as regarded ability to see and to hear; after so splendid a building, he asked, ‘how can anyone relish our ill-contrived oblong holes of London?’ On 18 October 1787, having witnessed a performance of Piron's Métromanie, he declared:

True, great actors and actresses, ‘brilliants of the first water’, could be seen in London at the time Young was writing: notably of course Sarah Siddons and her brother John Philip Kemble; but the point Young is making here is that the Comédie-Française was much more than a chance grouping of talented players.