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This, then, is the obligatory scene as Sarcey generally understands it a scene which, for one reason or another, an audience expects and ardently desires. I have italicized the phrase "expectation mingled with uncertainty" because it expresses in other terms the idea which I have sought to convey in the formula "foreshadowing without forestalling."
Besides her official receptions on Wednesdays, Augustine Brohan received more unceremoniously on Sunday afternoon. I resolutely started off.... Even now I can recall the smallest details of that interview. But see how all depends upon our point of view. I had told Sarcey the comical story of my first appearance in society, and one day Sarcey repeated it to Augustine Brohan.
It is a little surprising to find Sarcey, so recently as 1889, laying it down that "a character is a master faculty or passion, which absorbs all the rest.... To study and paint a character is, therefore, by placing a man in a certain number of situations, to show how this principal motive force in his nature annihilates or directs all those which, if he had been another man, would probably have come into action."
Sarcey, on the other hand, brought up in the school of the "well-made" play, would rather have held it a feather in the playwright's cap that he should have known just where, and just how, he might safely outrage probability . The inference is that we now take the dramatist's art more seriously than did the generation of the Second Empire in France.
My third appearance at the Comedie resulted in the following boutade from the pen of the same Sarcey: L'Opinion Nationale, September 12: "The same evening Les Femmes Savantes was given. This was Mlle. Bernhardt's third debut, and she assumed the role of Henriette. This performance was a very poor affair, and gives rise to reflections by no means gay. That Mlle.
Francisque Sarcey was fond of insisting that an audience would generally accept without cavil any postulates in reason which an author chose to impose upon it, with regard to events supposed to have occurred before the rise of the curtain; always provided that the consequences deduced from them within the limits of the play were logical, plausible, and entertaining.
That night the Reds breathed fire and fury against the Government, "and the respectable part of Paris," says M. de Sarcey, the great dramatic critic, "saw themselves between two dangers. It would be hard to say which of them they dreaded most. They hated the Prussians very much, but they feared the men of Belleville more."
The attendance of the little party was, moreover, in most cases at the Théâtre Français; and it has been sufficiently indicated that our friend, though the child of a sceptical age and the votary of a cynical science, was still candid enough to take the serious, the religious view of that establishment the view of M. Sarcey and of the unregenerate provincial mind.
Raphael Felix didn't seem to me eager to become acquainted with it. Problem! All the papers cite as a proof of my depravity, the episode of the Turkish woman, which they misrepresent, naturally; and Sarcey compares me to Marquis de Sade, whom he confesses he has not read! All that does not upset me at all. But I wonder what use there is in printing my book?
Reichenbach, the doyenne of the Comedie Francaise, as Suzel. Of this charming artist Sarcey wrote that, having attained her sixteenth year, there she made the long-stop, never oldening with others. L'Ami Fritz is, in reality, a German bucolic, the scene being laid in Bavaria. But it has long been accepted as a classic, and on the stage it becomes thoroughly French.
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