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[Footnote 1: For example, in his criticism of Becque's La Parisienne (Quarante Ans de Théâtre, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end of the second act, one of his neighbours said to him, "Eh! bien, vous voil
In a subtle comedy, or a psychological tragedy, the essential characters should have the stage as much as possible to themselves. In Becque's La Parisienne there are only four characters and a servant; in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac there are fifty-four personages named in the playbill, to say nothing of supernumeraries.
I mean to state that some of the finest plays of the modern age differ from a psychological novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling. Example, Henri Becque's La Parisienne, than which there is no better.
Even to a mere outsider, an idle bystander of the boulevards, this complete exposure of the social, moral, and political hypocricies of a nation seemed exceptionally brutal. Les Affaires sont les Affaires is pure theatre, perhaps, but it might be considered the best play produced in France between Becque's La Parisienne and Brieux's Les Hannetons.
[Footnote 2: Henri Becque's two best-known plays aptly exemplify the two types of opening. In Les Corbeaux we have almost an entire act of calm domesticity in which the only hint of coming trouble is an allusion to Vigneron's attacks of vertigo. In La Parisienne Clotilde and Lafont are in the thick of a vehement quarrel over a letter. It proceeds for ten minutes or so, at the end of which Clotilde says, "Prenez garde, voil
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