witched by Mariamne,
strutted a dragoon; and the whole establishment showed it was under very
bad management. Fuzelier collected some of these parodies,[295] and not
unskilfully defends their nature and their object against the protest of
La Motte, whose tragedies had severely suffered from these burlesques.
His celebrated domestic tragedy of _Inez de Castro_, the fable of which
turns on a concealed and clandestine marriage, produced one of the
happiest parodies in _Agnes de Chaillot_. In the parody, the cause of
the mysterious obstinacy of Pierrot the son, in persisting to refuse the
hand of the daughter of his mother-in-law, Madame _la Baillive_, is thus
discovered by her to Monsieur _le Baillif_:--

Mon mari, pour le coup j'ai decouvert l'affaire,
Ne vous etonnez plus qu'a nos desirs contraire,
Pour ma fille Pierrot ne montre que mepris:
Voila l'unique objet dont son coeur est epris.
[_Pointing to Agnes de Chaillot_.

The Baillif exclaims,

Ma servante!

This single word was the most lively and fatal criticism of the tragic
action of Inez de Castro, which, according to the conventional decorum
and fastidious code of French criticism, grossly violated the majesty of
Melpomene, by giving a motive and an object so totally undignified to
the tragic tale. In the parody there was something ludicrous when the
secret came out which explained poor Pierrot's long-concealed
perplexities, in the maid-servant bringing forward a whole legitimate
family of her own! La Motte was also galled by a projected parody of his
"Machabees"--where the hasty marriage of the young Machabeus, and the
sudden conversion of the amorous Antigone, who, for her first
penitential act, persuades a youth to marry her, without first deigning
to consult her respectable mother, would have produced an excellent
scene for the parody. But La Motte prefixed an angry preface to his
_Inez de Castro_; he inveighs against all parodies, which he asserts to
be merely a French fashion (we have seen, however, that it was once
Grecian), the offspring of a dangerous spirit of ridicule, and the
malicious amusement of superficial minds.--"Were this true," retorts
Fuzelier, "we ought to detest parodies; but we maintain, that far from
converting virtue into a paradox, and degrading truth by ridicule,
PARODY will only strike at what is chimerical and false; it is not a
piece of buffoonery so much as a critical exposition. What do we