Elephant bird determined that "Vorombe titan" reached weights of and stood tall, making it the world's largest bird, slightly larger than the much older "Dromornis stirtoni". Elephant birds have been extinct since at least the 17th century. Étienne de Flacourt, a French governor of Madagascar in the 1640s and 1650s, mentions an ostrich-like bird said to inhabit unpopulated regions, though it is unclear whether he was repeating folk tales passed on from generations earlier. In 1659, Flacourt wrote of the "vouropatra – a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places
François Lays jeers from the audience, and had never recovered from the experience, eventually taking his own life with poison. Quéruel writes Lays managed to avoid making his return to the stage in "Iphigénie en Tauride", in which his character Oreste sang lines which were a little too suggestive coming from an ex-"Terrorist": "J'ai trahi l'amitié, j'ai trahi la nature/Des plus noirs attentats, j'ai comblé la mesure" ("I have betrayed friendship, betrayed Nature/I have gone to the extreme of blackest deeds"). On the other hand, according to the memoirs of Count , it was indeed in the role of Oreste that Lays