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In the rat-haunted lofts and lumber-rooms may still be seen, worm-eaten and covered with dust, the cacolet a wooden structure shaped like the gable roof of a house, and which, when set upon a horse's back, afforded sitting accommodation for two or three persons on each side.
Especially to be noted is the same perfectly serious pushing of the dramatic commonplaces to an absurd conclusion. There is the same kind of humor too, and the same girding at the stock tricks of stage-craft in H.M.S. Pinafore at the swapping of children in the cradle, and in Tricoche et Cacolet at the "portrait de ma mère" which has drawn so many tears in modern melodrama.
Troopers of the Light Horse were riding with gunners from the artillery; cacolet camels, whose native drivers had their heads shrouded in blankets, trudged beside ambulance carts; here and there a man who had lost his horse stumbled wearily along, first in one column then in another; guns and ammunition-limbers were mingled with cable-waggons; and all followed blindly man or waggon in front of them.
In time, of course, his luck turned; he had plays performed and stories published; and at last he met M. Henri Meilhac, and entered on that collaboration of nearly twenty years' duration to which we owe "Froufrou" and "Tricoche et Cacolet," on the one hand, and on the other the books of Offenbach's most brilliant operas "Barbebleue," for example, and "La Périchole."
Better even than La Boule is Tricoche et Cacolet, which is the name of a firm of private detectives whose exploits and devices surpass those imagined by Poe in America, by Wilkie Collins in England, and by Gaboriau in France.
To me it is neither higher comedy nor more provocative of laughter than either La Boule or Tricoche et Cacolet; and the modern plays, as I have said, are based on a study of life as it is, while the figures of the older comedies are frankly conventional.
It is to be remembered always that the author of L'Abbé Constantin is also the half-author of "Froufrou" and of "Tricoche et Cacolet," as well as of the librettos of "La Belle Hélène" and of "La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein."
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