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Updated: May 26, 2025
This is, in fact, a powerful drama, somewhat in the Sardou manner; but Congreve had none of Sardou's deftness in manipulating an intrigue. Maskwell is not only a double-dealer, but a triple or quadruple-dealer; so that the brain soon grows dizzy in the vortex of his villainies. The play, it may be noted, was a failure.
Manager DALY found Frou Frou so popular, that he has given us a second dose of M. SARDOU'S Dramatic Mixture, three times stronger than the first, and warranted to restore the moral tone of all repentant Pretty Waiter Girls. The label borne by the new Mixture is "Fernande," but as "CLOTILDE," and not "FERNANDE," is the principal ingredient, the name is obviously ill-selected.
In fiction Milady and Madame Marneffe come in for first honors in each the leopard crossed on the serpent and united under a petticoat, beautiful and wicked but since the Balzac and Dumas days the story-tellers and stage-mongers have made exceeding free with the type, and we have between Herman Merivale's Stephanie de Mohrivart and Victorien Sardou's Zica a very theater or shall we say a charnel house of the woman with the past; usually portrayed as the victim of circumstance; unprincipled through cruel experience; insensible through lack of conscience; sexless in soul, but a siren in seductive arts; cold as ice; hard as iron; implacable as the grave, pursuing her ends with force of will, intellectual audacity and elegance of manner, yet, beneath this brilliant depravity, capable of self-pity, yielding anon in moments of depression to a sudden gleam of human tenderness and a certain regret for the innocence she has lost.
The old lady arrived, carrying as usual the little box with the lace cap which she donned as soon as her bonnet was laid aside. On this great day the little cap was embellished by a mauve satin ribbon, contrasting charmingly with the silver of her hair. All through lunch Esperance was delightful. Her quick responses to Sardou's questions were amazing in their logic.
'Fedora' , an adaptation of Sardou's famous drama, has less musical interest than 'Andrea Chénier, the breathless incidents of the plot giving but little scope for musical treatment. The first act shows the death of Vladimir, the police investigation and Fedora's vow to discover the murderer.
Both She Stoops to Conquer and The Rivals are good examples of the rapid working-out of an intrigue, engendered, developed, and resolved all within the frame of the picture. Single-adventure plays of a more modern type are the elder Dumas's Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, the younger Dumas's Francillon, Sardou's Divorçons, Sir Arthur Pinero's Gay Lord Quex, Mr.
She contracted her beautiful eyebrows a little. "Oh! M. Mounet-Sully, I am rich just now, think of all the money that I have made these four months that we have been giving Victorien Sardou's play. I don't want anything, I am glad, so glad...." She kissed her father and her mother impulsively, and also the astonished old Mademoiselle.
M. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac is not merely Cyrano, but also Constant Coquelin; Sardou's La Tosca is not merely La Tosca, but also Mme. Sarah Bernhardt; Molière's Célimène is not merely Célimène, but also Mlle. Molière; Shakespeare's Hamlet is not merely Hamlet, but also Richard Burbage.
The Sorceress is but a lifeless piece of mechanism; and when it was performed in English by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, it failed to lure or to thrill. But Sarah Bernhardt, because as an actress she is Zoraya, contrived to lift it into life. Justly we may say that, in a certain sense, this is Sarah Bernhardt's drama instead of Victorien Sardou's.
Not that light circumstance, however, pleads for commemoration, nor yet the further fact that I was to admire Mademoiselle Fargeuil, in the after-time, the time after she had given all Sardou's earlier successes the help of her shining firmness, when she had passed from interesting comedy and even from romantic drama not less, perhaps still more, interesting, with Sardou's Patrie as a bridge to the use of the bigger brush of the Ambigu and other homes of melodrama.
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