on social actions of a stereotyped nature, from an ordinary
prize-distribution to the solemn sitting of a court of justice. Any
form or formula is a ready-made frame into which the comic element may
be fitted.

Here, again, the comic will be emphasised by bringing it nearer to its
source. From the idea of travesty, a derived one, we must go back to
the original idea, that of a mechanism superposed upon life. Already,
the stiff and starched formality of any ceremonial suggests to us an
image of this kind. For, as soon as we forget the serious object of a
solemnity or a ceremony, those taking part in it give us the impression
of puppets in motion. Their mobility seems to adopt as a model the
immobility of a formula. It becomes automatism. But complete automatism
is only reached in the official, for instance, who performs his duty
like a mere machine, or again in the unconsciousness that marks an
administrative regulation working with inexorable fatality, and setting
itself up for a law of nature. Quite by chance, when reading the
newspaper, I came across a specimen of the comic of this type. Twenty
years ago, a large steamer was wrecked off the coast at Dieppe. With
considerable difficulty some of the passengers were rescued in a boat.
A few custom-house officers, who had courageously rushed to their
assistance, began by asking them "if they had anything to declare." We
find something similar, though the idea is a more subtle one, in the
remark of an M.P. when questioning the Home Secretary on the morrow of
a terrible murder which took place in a railway carriage: "The
assassin, after despatching his victim, must have got out the wrong
side of the train, thereby infringing the Company's rules."

A mechanical element introduced into nature and an automatic regulation
of society, such, then, are the two types of laughable effects at which
we have arrived. It remains for us, in conclusion, to combine them and
see what the result will be.

The result of the combination will evidently be a human regulation of
affairs usurping the place of the laws of nature. We may call to mind
the answer Sganarelle gave Geronte when the latter remarked that the
heart was on the left side and the liver on the right: "Yes, it was so
formerly, but we have altered all that; now, we practise medicine in
quite a new way." We may also recall the consultation between M. de
Pourceaugnac's two doctors: "The arguments you have used are so erudite
an