Four plays FROM THE FRENCH OF EMILE AUGIER WrrH A PREFACE BY EUGENE BRIEUX CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM Tne 7-Day Shelf '""'"^ PQ 2154!A6A23"'r9lT Four plays. 3 1924 027 698 186 FOUR PLAYS BY AUGIER THE FOLLOWING ARE THE FOUR PLAYS IN THIS VOLUME OLYMPE'S MARRIAGE MONSIEUR POIRIER'S SON-IN-LAW THE HOUSE OF FOURCHAMBAULT THE POST-SCRIPT 5 FOUR PLAYS By EMILE AUGIER TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION By BARRETT H CLARK WITH A PREFACE BY BRIEUX NEW YORK 'ALFRED A KNOPF '191 COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF TBB-FLIHPTOH'FRESS tlOS\rgQD-MASS-VS-A To J. RALPH BENZIES This volume is affectionately dedicated. Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027698186 CONTENTS PREFACE [LETTER BY BRIEUX] vii INTRODUCTION [BY BARRETT H. CLARK] xi LIST OF PLAYS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY xxvii OLYMPE'S MARRIAGE 1 CLE MARIAGE D'OLYMPE] MONSIEUR POIRIER'S SON-IN-LAW 71 [ITe GENDRE DE M. POIRIER] THE HOUSE OF FOURCHAMBAULT 141 [LES FOURCHAMBAULT] THE POST-SCRIPT 217 [LE POST-SCRIPTUM] ' PREFACE My Dear Mr. Clark: I had occasion to explain to you when you were planning ASthe present volume, I can see among the numerous reasons for the success which it will achieve that it is above all a timely book, introducing as it does the work of Emile Augier to the American public at the moment when the evolution of the taste of that public is directing it precisely toward that form of dramatic art which is exemplified by the author of "Le Gendre de M. Poirier." No longer content merely with dramas of adventure and plays in which sensational incidents and arbitrary development render them closely akin to the newspaper serial or the fairy-tale, this public has ceased looking to the theatre solely as an amusement, a pleasant recreation and distraction from its daily occupations; it is now interested in more complex problems; it is willing to listen to arguments — a process more taxing, possibly, than the other, but thereby only the more fascinating. Avid of progress and bent on the quest of the most recent and most profound manifestations of thought, it cannot fail at this time to take an interest in the theatre of ideas. In- deed, if the drama of Ibsen has already attracted the attention of this public, it is certain that there has existed some transitional form of dramatic art between that drama and the works first presented in America. Each epoch has its particular way of thinking and its particu- lar kind of plays. Our epoch is that of the social play. The material progress of civilization, reducing the distance and obstacles which hitherto separated the nations, has resulted in bringing us closer to one another, arousing our common interests and stimulating those mental and spiritual qualities viii PREFACE which unite the Old World with the New. This art in my opinion is only the result of that sympathetic note which we seek in those who not many years ago were total strangers to us. You have made a most wise and careful choice among the works of Emile Augier. "Le Gendre de M. Poirier," his most celebrated comedy, together with "Les Fourchambault " and "Le Mariage d'Olympe," set forth and defend principles and ideas which cannot but find favour in the United States. This play |3"Le Gendre de M. Poirier"] may be compared with an exciting and chivalrous tournament, in which the con- testants represent the two forms of nobility: that of the heart or spirit, nobility pure and simple, and that of caste. The first triumphs over the other, yet without crushing it — as is just and fitting. Antoinette Poirier, having succeeded in arousing the enthusiasm and admiration of her husband the Marquis de Presles to the point where he renders her the highest possible homage — he acknowledges that in her heart he has found that of his mother the Marquise — exclaims, wounded and yet radi- antly happy in the full consciousness of her legitimate pride: " I have my mother's heart!" This play then sums up in these two speeches — one uttered by the representative of individual pride, the other by the repre- sentative of traditional haughtiness, which may occasionally hide but never destroy, the essential qualities of the aristocracy. Here is depicted that struggle, intelligent, courteous, tender, too, between race and caste, with honor in the balance. In short, here we are able to observe commonsense, sentiment, and French good-humour finally at swords' points with traditional pride and all its concomitant sophistry, achieving a triumph, a triumph however over what is conventional and superficial in this ancient pride, for it respects and honours the prestige and greatness of the past and even admits the charm of aristocratic idiosyncrasies. Finally, as a sort of compensation due us for the exaggera- tions of the Naturalistic School, there is not a single odious PREFACE ix personage in this lively and natural comedy, for Madame de Montjay is only a dramatic "utility," which Augier took pleasure in relegating far into the background. As for the Marquis de Presles, he is exquisitely French, and his purely superficial faults scarcely detract from his charm in the eyes of the Poirier-Verdelet partnership. Nor do the petty meannesses of these old gentlemen greatly lower them in our eyes — what a good excuse they have! After this optimistic and charming play it was necessary to select one showing Emile Augier under his severest aspect. You have done this in choos- ing "Le Manage d'OIympe." '^Emile Augier has always stood for the great middle classes. Its ideals are order and regularity, justice, the family and fire- side. He considers from a tragic viewpoint what Moliere laughed at in order not to cry over, and he stands forth as champion against every peril which threatens to destroy conjugal happiness. His middle-class honesty prevented his sentimentalising over the lot of the prostitute; throughout his plays he shows himself her constant enemy. His Olympe is the exact counterpart of " Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux camelias ": she is a cynical and insidious being, whom unhoped-for good fortune has not succeeded in overthrowing. Having made her way by subterfuge into society and the intimacy of the family circle, she does not seek real redemption. Seized with a homesickness for her vile past, she makes use of her position only in order to wreck the happiness of those about her, up to the day when the gentleman of the old school, whose nephew she has ensnared and married, puts an end to her in an access of indignation. In "Les Fourchambault " we observe the struggle between ambition and the material interests on the one hand, and natural impulse and the true nobility of the heart on the other. In every scene Emile Augier maintains his antipathy to fortunes which, when they are not honourably acquired, are the brutal weapons directed against those who are weaker, or else when they are PREFACE utilised for ends to which our reason, our commonsense and our desire for justice, are radically opposed. The sordid, petty, and ambitious Madame Fourchambault, Fourchambault, Bernard and his mother, are synthetic figures, types of humanity at large, thrust into the midst of social drama. Emile Augier was great as an observer of the society of his time. Weary of the conventional, romantic, superannuated drama of his day, of religious and historical themes, he preferred to treat those questions which the life of his time furnishes every day to the dramatist. The powers of good and evil have since Augier's day changed in the matter of terminology, together with the methods of treat- ing them as material for drama. He was among the first to realise that an individual face to face with questions of physiolog- ical and social heredity was quite as poignant a subject for study as was the legendary hero pursued by the anahke of antiquity; so that the plays of the present are more attractive to us than those of early times by reason of the interest aroused by the discussions to which they give rise, discussions which we can immediately assimilate and allow to react upon our consciousness as living beings. Such then are the questions treated in the plays of Emile Augier which this volume offers to the American public. I am delighted. Monsieur, to join you in rendering homage to the lit- erary memory of a master whom I consider one of the greatest of that line in which I am proud and happy to consider myself as a dramatist and French writer. Yours, etc., Breux. INTRODUCTION EMILE AUGIER THE present volume is the first attempt to make known in English something of the rich and varied genius of one of the ablest and most influential dramatists of the nine- teenth century. Up to the present, Emile Augier has been accessible to readers of English only through translations of two plays, while among the rare studies of the subject in our language the only one that pretends to any sort of completeness is the illuminating and sympathetic essay by Professor Brander Matthews in his "French Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century." The first three plays, here translated for the first time, are typical of three separate and distinct manners of their author; the fourth is a delicate and amusing trifle, serving to show rather what he could do in an odd moment than to stand for a different phase of his work.