drama a trifling with the solemn
truths of Scripture; and even by the Catholic clergy, who, roused to
greater strictness by the challenge of Protestantism, found the comic
elements in the plays offensive and dangerous, and perhaps feared that
too great familiarity with the Bible as represented in the mysteries
might lead the people into heresy.{21} Yet we hear occasionally of
Christmas dramas in France in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries. In the neighbourhood of Nantes, for instance, a play of the
Nativity by Claude Macee, hermit, probably written in the seventeenth
century, was commonly performed in the first half of the nineteenth.{22}
At Clermont the adoration of the shepherds was still performed in 1718,
and some kind of representation of the scene continued in the diocese of
Cambrai until 1834, when it was forbidden by the bishop. In the south,
especially at Marseilles, "pastorals" were played towards the end of the
nineteenth century; they had, however, largely lost their sacred
character, and had become a kind of review of the events of the
year.{23} At Dinan, in Brittany, some sort of Herod play was performed,
though it was dying out, in 1886. It was acted by young men on the
Epiphany, and there was an "innocent" whose throat they pretended to cut
with a wooden sword.{24}

|142| An interesting summary of a very full Nativity play performed in
the churches of Upper Gascony on Christmas Eve is given by Countess
Martinengo-Cesaresco.{25} It ranges from the arrival of Joseph and Mary
at Bethlehem to the Flight into Egypt and the Murder of the Innocents,
but perhaps the most interesting parts are the shepherd scenes. After the
message of the angel--a child in a surplice, with wings fastened to his
shoulders, seated on a chair drawn up to the ceiling and supported by
ropes--the shepherds leave the church, the whole of which is now regarded
as the stable of the Divine Birth. They knock for admittance, and Joseph,
regretting that the chamber is "so badly lighted," lets them in. They
fall down before the manger, and so do the shepherdesses, who "deposit on
the altar steps a banner covered with flowers and greenery, from which
hang strings of small birds, apples, nuts, chestnuts, and other fruits.
It is their Christmas offering to the cure; the shepherds have already
placed a whole sheep before the altar, in a like spirit." The play is not
mere dumb-show, but has a full libretto.

A rather similar p