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Updated: May 26, 2025
On the outskirts of this village are now two forged and gilded gateways through which the passer-by can catch a glimpse of trim avenues, fountains, and well-kept lawns. There seems a certain poetical justice in the fact that Alexandre Dumas fils and Victorien Sardou, the two giants of modern drama, should have divided between them the inheritance of Louis XIV., its greatest patron.
He dismissed the chief at once, and after saying farewell to Père Victorien, who was embarking immediately for his own island of Haitheu, Père Simeon and I entered his study, a pitifully shabby room where rickety furniture, quaking floor, tattered wall-coverings, and cracked plates and goblets spelled the story of the passing of an institution once possessing grandeur and force.
It is divided into twenty periods, and I have allotted the fifteenth to Joan. She well merits a period." My mind continually harked back to the prompting of Père Victorien concerning the horse and the girl of the jubilee. "There were signs at the commemoration?" I interposed. Père Simeon glanced at me eagerly. His naivete was not of ignorance of men and their motives.
How infinitely cleverer than the dramatist who constructs the tragi-comedy of life." This is what we inevitably exclaim as we watch Victorien Sardou, in whom French ingenuity culminated and caricatured itself, laying the foundations of one of his labyrinthine intrigues.
The plays of Victorien Sardou and the classic dramas of the state theatre are studies in the art of group arrangements. It will be noticed in most groups that there is an active and a passive element, that many figures in their reserve are required to play second to a few. The active principle is represented by these to whom a single idea is delivered for expression.
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.
There are a few, I know, who think that Froufrou was written by the fertile and ingenious M. Victorien Sardou, and who, without thinking, credit M. Jacques Offenbach with the composition of the words as well as the music of the Grande Duchesse; and as for Carmen, is it not an Italian opera, and is not the book, like the music, the work of some Italian?
A most flattering ovation was waiting for me on my arrival. Then, three days afterwards, installed in my little mansion in the Avenue de Villiers, I received Victorien Sardou, in order to hear him read his magnificent piece, Fedora. What a great artiste! What an admirable actor! What a marvellous author!
A ring at the front door bell cut short her words. They listened silently, and heard the door open, and someone come in. Then the maid entered with a card. Francois Darbois rose at once. "I will see him in the salon," he said. He handed the card to his wife and went to meet his visitor. Esperance leaned towards her mother and read with her the celebrated name, "Victorien Sardou."
Clarisse Mergy stopped for a few seconds and resumed, in a stifled voice: "I shall never forget it... The three of us were in the drawing-room. Oh, I can hear even now the terrible words of threat and hatred which he uttered! Victorien was absolutely astounded.
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