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Updated: October 22, 2025
THE FRENCH ACADEMY has decreed to M. Emile Augier, the author of Gabrielle, the prize of seven thousand francs, for the best dramatic work inculcating principles of rectitude and morality. THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM has conferred the honorary degree of M.A. on Robert Stephenson, and on Mr. Henry Taylor, the author of "Philip Van Artevelde."
A lieutenant in the navy, M. Hernoux, put me through the course of study of the Naval School. At the same time I set assiduously to work to learn drawing. My first master in this line was M. Barbier, the father of Jules Barbier, the poet and librettist, who, with Emile Augier, was a class-mate of my young brothers.
The company of the Theatre Francais had been commanded to play this evening. The piece chosen was the latest one of Emile Augier, which has had a great success in Paris, called "Le fils Giboyer." Emile Augier, who was invited specially, was present. Madeleine Brohan, Coquelin, Breton, and Madame Favard had the principal roles.
In Les Fourchambault, by Emile Augier, the first act introduces us to the household of a merchant, of Havre, who has married a wealthy, but extravagant woman, and has a son and daughter who are being gradually corrupted by their mother's worldliness. We learn that Fourchambault, senior, has, in his youth, betrayed a young woman who was a governess in his family.
Add to this the old thinness of the school of Scribe and the old emptiness of the thousand vaudevillistes; which part of the exhibition, till modern comedy began, under the younger Dumas and Augier, had for its counterpart but the terrible dead weight, or at least the prodigious prolixity and absurdity, of much, not to say of most, of the romantic and melodramatic "output."
It was against Veuillot that Augier had just aimed the introduction to his excellent comedy, Le Fils de Giboyer, and he made no secret of the fact that in the Deodat mentioned in the piece he had had this writer of holy abuse in his mind. Hello was in everything Veuillot's vassal.
I turned towards Perrin, who was listening silently. "Are you of the same opinion, sir?" "I talked it over a short time ago with these gentlemen, but the author is master to do as he pleases with his work." Then, addressing myself to Bornier, I said, "Well, my dear author, what have you decided?" Little Bornier looked at big Emile Augier.
The insignificant School of Common Sense could not by any means be regarded as marking an epoch. Neither, with any justice, could men like Augier and Dumas be placed in different groups. The attempt to point out realism in the lyric art was likewise exceedingly audacious.
The woes of the heavy father of the stage, where there is no true pathos, but only a sentimental version of it, find us very callous. The language has none of that exquisite grace and flexibility which makes a good French comedy of own day, a piece by Augier, Sandeau, Feuillet, Sardou, so delightful.
So, too, Ibsen does without the raisonneur of Dumas and Augier, that condensation of the Greek chorus into a single person, who is only the mouthpiece of the author himself and who exists chiefly to point the moral, even tho he may sometimes also adorn the tale. Ibsen so handles his story that it points its own moral; his theme is so powerfully presented in action that it speaks for itself.
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