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Even when the framework was larger as in Le Sage's Gil Blas and Marivaux's Vie de Marianne the spirit was the same; it was the spirit of selection, of simplification, of delicate skill. Both the latter works are written in a prose style of deliberate elegance, and both consist rather of a succession of small incidents almost of independent short stories than of one large developing whole.
He was ready to preside with all ceremony at a presentation of Marivaux's Death of Hannibal, played in the original, with such imperfect mastery of the French accent as the lovers of new light in Rosenmold had at command, in a theatre copied from that at Versailles, lined with pale yellow satin, and with a picture, amid the stucco braveries of the ceiling, of the Septentrional Apollo himself, in somewhat watery red and blue.
He was ready to preside with all ceremony at a presentation of Marivaux's Death of Hannibal, played in the original, with such imperfect mastery of the French accent as the lovers of new light in Rosenmold had at command, in a theatre copied from that at Versailles, lined with pale yellow satin, and with a picture, amid the stucco braveries of the ceiling, of the Septentrional Apollo himself, in somewhat watery red and blue.
Frequent the theatre whenever Corneille, Racine, and Moliere's pieces are played. They are according to nature and to truth. If you choose to know the characters of people now in fashion, read Crebillon the younger, and Marivaux's works. The former is a most excellent painter; the latter has studied, and knows the human heart, perhaps too well.
All Marivaux's dramas pass in a world of his own invention a world curiously compounded of imagination and reality. At first sight one can see nothing there but a kind of conventional fantasy, playing charmingly round impossible situations and queer delightful personages, who would vanish in a moment into thin air at the slightest contact with actual flesh and blood.
The day after this dismal ceremony I made my debut at the Odeon in Le jeu de l'amour et du hasard. I was not suited for Marivaux's plays, as they require a certain coquettishness and an affectation which were not then and still are not among my qualities. Then, too, I was rather too slight, so that I made no success at all.
"How charming! And what will you play?" "I play the Marquise in one of Marivaux's comedies." "And who will play the Marquis?" asked Sara. "There is no Marquis," answered Brigit, laughing a little. "But," she added, "there is a Chevalier and a Comte. One of Prince d'Alchingen's attachés will play the Comte. M. de Castrillon will play the part of the Chevalier."
Merely to see him would have been enough to tell you that Beaumarchais' Figaro, Moliere's Mascarille, Marivaux's Frontin, and Dancourt's Lafleur those great representatives of audacious swindling, of cunning driven to bay, of stratagem rising again from the ends of its broken wires were all quite second-rate by comparison with this giant of cleverness and meanness.
If we wish to study the masterpieces of French comedy in the eighteenth century, we shall promptly shut up the volumes of Diderot, and turn to the ease and soft gracefulness of Marivaux's Game of Love and Chance, to the forcible and concentrated sententiousness of Piron's Métromanie, to the salt and racy flavour of Le Sage's Turcaret.
Frequent the theatre whenever Corneille, Racine, and Moliere's pieces are played. They are according to nature and to truth. If you choose to know the characters of people now in fashion, read Crebillon the younger, and Marivaux's works. The former is a most excellent painter; the latter has studied, and knows the human heart, perhaps too well.
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