rrichon_, he is an excellent
comic poet, dealing with comedy seriously as comedy should be dealt with,
and incarnating a vice or an affectation in a certain character with
impeccable justness and assurance. Now and then, as in _les Petits
Oiseaux_ and _les Vivacites du Capitaine Tic_, he is content to tell a
charming story as pleasantly as possible. Sometimes, as in _Celimare le
Bien-Aime_ (held by M. Sarcey to be the high-water mark of the modern
_vaudeville_), _le Plus Heureux des Trois_, and _le Prix Martin_, he
fights again from a humouristic point of view that triangular duel
between the wife, the husband, and the lover which fills so large a place
in the literature of France; and then he shows the reverse of the medal
of adultery--with the husband at his ease, the seducer haunted by the
ghosts of old sins, the erring wife the slave of her unsuspecting lord.
Or again, he takes to turning the world upside down, and--as in the
_Cagnotte_, the _Chapeau de Paille_, and the _Trente Millions_--to
producing a scheme of morals and society that seems to have been dictated
from an Olympus demoralised by champagne and lobster. But at his wildest
he never forgets that men and women are themselves. His dialogue is
always right and appropriate, however extravagant it be. His vivid and
varied knowledge of life and character supplies him with touches enough
of nature and truth to make the fortune of a dozen ordinary dramatists;
and withal you feel as you read that he is writing, as Augier says of
him, to amuse himself merely, and that he could an if he would be solemn
and didactic with all the impressiveness that a perfect acquaintance with
men and things and an admirable dramatic aptitude can bestow. The fact
that he is always in a good temper has done him some wrong in that it has
led him to be to all appearances amusing only, where he might well have
posed as a severe and serious artist. But he is none the less true for
having elected to be funny, and there is certainly more genuine human
nature and human feeling in such drolleries as the _Chapeau de Paille_
and _le Plus Heureux des Trois_ than in all the serious dramas of Ponsard
(say) and Hugo put together.

Labiche.

Perhaps the most characteristic and individual part of his work is that
in which he has given his invention full swing, and allowed his humour to
play its maddest pranks at will. _Moi_ is an admirable comedy, and De la
Porcheraie is almost hideous