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Updated: May 14, 2025
Now picture to yourself Tartarin, travelling in Switzerland, arrested and imprisoned: second series, independent of the former. The transposition from the ancient to the modern always a laughable one draws its inspiration from the same idea. Labiche has made use of this method in every shape and form.
Shakespeare excepted, you eclipsed all who came before you; and from those that follow, however fresh, we turn: we turn from Regnard and Beaumarchais, from Sheridan: and Goldsmith, from Musset and Pailleron and Labiche, to that crowded world of your creations.
Where plays had been constructed on a journeyman plan evolved by Labiche and Sardou mid-nineteenth century writers in France a plan delighting in symmetry, close-jointedness, false correspondences, an impossible use of coincidence, and a quite unreal complexity and elaboration, they become bolder and less artificial, more close to the likelihoods of real life.
Ah, she understood now how Emmeline Labiche had felt constrained to seek her lover from the snows of Canada to the moss-veiled oaks of Louisiana. But her joyous, hopeful soul could not think of love and disappointment at the same moment. "I have seen him, and I shall see him again. We met by appointment. Destiny introduced us.
When he is polished off and has paid his "quarter" of tribute, the next man gets up, and the dirt is then brushed back on to number one, with number two's collection added. Labiche begins one of his plays with two servants at work in a salon. "Dusting," says one of them, "is the art of sending the dirt from the chair on the right over to the sofa on the left."
Similar instances abound in daily life, but if you do not care to take the trouble to look for them, you have only to open at random a volume of Labiche, and you will be almost certain to light upon an effect of this kind.
Take, for instance, the remark of one of the characters in a play by Labiche, "Only God has the right to kill His fellow-creature." It would seem that advantage is here taken of two separate familiar sayings; "It is God who disposes of the lives of men," and, "It is criminal for a man to kill his fellow-creature."
But it was the fund of observation and the leaven of satire which startled, aroused, and ultimately set the stage agog. Not even the lighter forms of composition were left unaffected. Labiche, in the vaudeville style, with his Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon and La Cagnotte, gave his audience, behind his puppets, the touch of present reality, the sensation of existent follies.
The French proverbe proceeds on this principle, and is often very witty and charming. A good example in English is A Pair of Spectacles, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche. In this bright little comedy every incident and situation bears upon the general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, but by its ingenious appropriateness.
In 1840 there appeared in the Bibliotheque Charpentier the Rabelais in a single duodecimo volume, begun by Charles Labiche, and, after his death, completed by M. Paul Lacroix, whose share is the larger. The text is that of L'Aulnaye; the short footnotes, with all their brevity, contain useful explanations of difficult words.
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