nd "le bon poete Lucrece"
express it, the love of the parent for the child becomes a devouring
mania, to which everything else is sacrificed, while the love of the
child for the parent is a tame and essentially selfish emotion,
absolutely powerless when it comes into competition with the passions
which are concerned with the transmission of the vital flame. This
theorem having been stated, what is the first obligatory scene?
Evidently one in which a mother shall refuse a second marriage, with a
man whom she loves, because it would injure the prospects and wound the
feelings of her adored daughter. Then, when the adored daughter herself
marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the
daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of
course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of
course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And
this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.
Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the
mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to
that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial
devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless
Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her
daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth,
unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne
light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband
to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and
rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to
complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.
These scenes are unmistakably _scenes a faire_, dictated by the logic of
the theme; but they belong to a conception of art in which the free
rhythms of life are ruthlessly sacrificed to the needs of a
demonstration. Obligatory scenes of this order are mere diagrams drawn
with ruler and compass--the obligatory illustrations of an extravagantly
over-systematic lecture.

M. Brieux in some of his plays (not in all) is no less logic-ridden than
M. Hervieu. Take, for instance, _Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont_: every
character is a term in a syllogism, every scene is dictated by an
imperious craving for symmetry. The main theorem may be stated in some
such terms as these: "The French marriage system is immoral and
abo