ACT I

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Transcriber’s note:

Words in bold characters are enclosed within Plus (+) signs.

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Three Plays by Brieux

Member of the French Academy

[Illustration: Brieux.]

Three Plays by Brieux.

With a Preface by Bernard

Shaw. The English

Versions by Mrs.

Bernard Shaw, St. John

Hankin and John Pollock.

London: A. C. Fifield,

13 Clifford’s Inn, E.C.

1911.

[_Copyright 1911 by Charlotte Frances Shaw. Entered at Stationers’

Hall and at the Library of Congress, Washington, U.S.A. All rights

reserved._]

_Printed by G. Standring, Finsbury St., London, E.C._

Contents

Brieux: a portrait Frontispiece

Preface by Bernard Shaw ix

Maternity. Translated by Mrs. Bernard

Shaw liv

The Three Daughters of M. Dupont. Translated

by St. John Hankin 71

Damaged Goods. Translated by John Pollock 176

Maternity (new version). Translated by

John Pollock 245

Preface

By Bernard Shaw.

From Molière to Brieux.

After the death of Ibsen, Brieux confronted Europe as the most

important dramatist west of Russia. In that kind of comedy which is so

true to life that we have to call it tragi-comedy, and which is not

only an entertainment but a history and a criticism of contemporary

morals, he is incomparably the greatest writer France has produced

since Molière. The French critics who take it for granted that no

contemporary of theirs could possibly be greater than Beaumarchais are

really too modest. They have never read Beaumarchais, and therefore do

not know how very little of him there is to read, and how, out of the

two variations he wrote on his once famous theme, the second is only

a petition in artistic and intellectual bankruptcy. Had the French

theatre been capable of offering a field to Balzac, my proposition

might have to be modified. But as it was no more able to do that than

the English theatre was to enlist the genius of Dickens, I may say

confidently that in that great comedy which Balzac called ‘the comedy

of humanity,’ to be played for the amusement of the gods rather than

for that of the French public, there is no summit in the barren plain

that stretches from Mount Molière to our own times until we reach

Brieux.

How the XIX century found itself out.

It is reserved for some great critic to give us a study of the

psychology of the XIX century. Those of us who as adults saw it

face to face in that last moiety of its days when one fierce hand

after another—Marx’s, Zola’s, Ibsen’s, Strindberg’s, Turgenief’s,

Tolstoy’s—stripped its masks off and revealed it as, on the whole,

perhaps the most villainous page of recorded human history, can also

recall the strange confidence with which it regarded itself as the

very summit of civilization, and talked of the past as a cruel gloom

that had been dispelled for ever by the railway and the electric

telegraph. But centuries, like men, begin to find themselves out in

middle age. The youthful conceit of the nineteenth had a splendid

exponent in Macaulay, and, for a time, a gloriously jolly one during

the nonage of Dickens. There was certainly nothing morbid in the

air then: Dickens and Macaulay are as free from morbidity as Dumas

_père_ and Guizot. Even Stendhal and Prosper Merimée, though by no

means burgess optimists, are quite sane. When you come to Zola and

Maupassant, Flaubert and the Goncourts, to Ibsen and Strindberg, to

Aubrey Beardsley and George Moore, to D’Annunzio and Echegaray, you are

in a new and morbid atmosphere. French literature up to the middle of

the XIX century was still all of one piece with Rabelais, Montaigne and

Molière. Zola breaks that tradition completely: he is as different as

Karl Marx from Turgot or Darwin from Cuvier.

In this new phase we see the bourgeoisie, after a century and a half

of complacent vaunting of its own probity and modest happiness (begun

by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe’s praises of ‘the middle station of

life’), suddenly turning bitterly on itself with accusations of hideous

sexual and commercial corruption. Thackeray’s campaign against snobbery

and Dickens’s against hypocrisy were directed against the vices of

respectable men; but now even the respectability was passionately

denied: the bourgeois was depicted as a thief, a tyrant, a sweater,

a selfish voluptuary whose marriages were simple legalizations of

unbridled licentiousness. Sexual irregularities began to be attributed

to the sympathetic characters in fiction not as the blackest spots in

their portraits, but positively as redeeming humanities in them.

Jack the Ripper.

I am by no means going here either to revive the old outcry against

this school of iconoclasts and disillusioners, or to join the new

reaction against it. It told the world many truths: it brought romance

back to its senses. Its very repudiation of the graces and enchantments

of fine art was necessary; for the artistic morbidezza of Byron and

Victor Hugo was too imaginative to allow the Victorian bourgeoisie

to accept them as chroniclers of real facts and real people. The

justification of Zola’s comparative coarseness is that his work could

not have been done in any other way. If Zola had had a sense of humor,

or a great artist’s delight in playing with his ideas, his materials,

and his readers, he would have become either as unreadable to the very

people he came to wake up as Anatole France is, or as incredible as

Victor Hugo was. He would also have incurred the mistrust and hatred

of the majority of Frenchmen, who, like the majority of men of all

nations, are not merely incapable of fine art, but resent it furiously.

A wit is to them a man who is laughing at them: an artist is a man of

loose character who lives by telling lying stories and pandering to the

voluptuous passions. What they like to read is the police intelligence,

especially the murder cases and divorce cases. The invented murders

and divorces of the novelists and playwrights do not satisfy them,

because they cannot believe in them; and belief that the horror or

scandal actually occurred, that real people are shedding real blood

and real tears, is indispensable to their enjoyment. To produce this

belief by works of fiction, the writer must disguise and even discard

the arts of the man of letters and assume the style of the descriptive

reporter of the criminal courts. As an example of how to cater for such

readers, we may take Zola’s Bête Humaine. It is in all its essentials

a simple and touching story, like Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. But into

it Zola has violently thrust the greatest police sensation of the XIX

century: the episode of Jack the Ripper. Jack’s hideous neurosis is

no more a part of human nature than Cæsar’s epilepsy or Gladstone’s

missing finger. One is tempted to accuse Zola of having borrowed it

from the newspapers to please his customers just as Shakespear used to

borrow stories of murder and jealousy from the tales and chronicles of

his time, and heap them on the head of convivial humorists like Iago

and Richard III, or gentle poets like Macbeth and Hamlet. Without such

allurements, Shakespear could not have lived by his plays. And if he

had been rich enough to disregard this consideration, he would still

have had to provide sensation enough to induce people to listen to what

he was inspired to say. It is only the man who has no message who is

too fastidious to beat the drum at the door of his booth.

Rise of the Scientific Spirit.

Still, the Shakesperean murders were romantic murders: the Zolaesque

ones were police reports. The old mad heroines, the Ophelias and Lucies

of Lammermoor, were rhapsodists with flowers in their hands: the new

ones were clinical studies of mental disease. The new note was as

conspicuous in the sensational chapters as in the dull chapters, of

which there were many. This was the punishment of the middle class

for hypocrisy. It had carried the conspiracy of silence which we call

decorum to such lengths that when young men discovered the suppressed

truths, they felt bound to shout them in the streets. I well remember

how when I was a youth in my teens I happened to obtain access to the

papers of an Irish crown solicitor through a colleague who had some

clerical work to do upon them. The county concerned was not one of the

crimeless counties: there was a large camp in it; and the soldier of

that day was not the respectable, rather pious, and very low-spirited

youth who now makes the King’s uniform what the curate’s black coat

was then. There were not only cases which were tried and not reported:

there were cases which could not even be tried, the offenders having

secured impunity by pushing their follies to lengths too grotesque to

be bearable even in a criminal court—also because of the silly ferocity

of the law, which punished the negligible indecencies of drunken young

soldiers as atrocious crimes. The effect produced by these revelations

on my raw youth was a sense of heavy responsibility for conniving at

their concealment. I felt that if camp and barrack life involved these

things, they ought to be known. I had been caught by the great wave of

scientific enthusiasm which was then passing over Europe as a result

of the discovery of Natural Selection by Darwin, and of the blow it

dealt to the vulgar Bible worship and redemption mongering which had

hitherto passed among us for religion. I wanted to get at the facts. I

was prepared for the facts being unflattering: had I not already faced

the fact that instead of being a fallen angel I was first cousin to a

monkey? Long afterwards, when I was a well-known writer, I said that

what we wanted as the basis of our plays and novels was not romance,

but a really scientific natural history. Scientific natural history is

not compatible with taboo; and as everything connected with sex was

tabooed, I felt the need for mentioning the forbidden subjects, not

only because of their own importance, but for the sake of destroying

taboo by giving it the most violent possible shocks. The same impulse

is unmistakeably active in Zola and his contemporaries. He also wanted,

not works of literary art, but stories he could believe in as records

of things that really happen. He imposed Jack the Ripper on his idyll

of the railwayman’s wife to make it scientific. To all artists and

Platonists he made it thereby very unreal; for to the Platonist all

accidents are unreal and negligible; but to the people he wanted to get

at—the anti-artistic people—he made it readable.

The scientific spirit was unintelligible to the Philistines and

repulsive to the dilettanti, who said to Zola: ‘If you must tell us

stories about agricultural laborers, why tell us dirty ones?’ But Zola

did not want, like the old romancers, to tell a story. He wanted to

tell the world the scientific truth about itself. His view was that

if you were going to legislate for agricultural laborers, or deal

with them or their business in any way, you had better know what they

are really like; and in supplying you with the necessary information

he did not tell you what you already knew, which included pretty

nearly all that could be decorously mentioned, but what you did not

know, which was that part of the truth that was tabooed. For the same

reason, when he found a generation whose literary notions of Parisian

cocotterie were founded on Marguerite Gauthier, he felt it to be a

duty to shew them Nana. And it was a very necessary thing to do. If

some Irish writer of the seventies had got himself banished from all

decent society, and perhaps convicted of obscene libel, by writing a

novel shewing the side of camp life that was never mentioned except in

the papers of the Crown Solicitor, we should be nearer to a rational

military system than we are today.

Zolaism as a Superstition.

It is, unfortunately, much easier to throw the forces of art into a

reaction than to recall them when the reaction has gone far enough.

A case which came under my own notice years ago illustrates the

difficulty. The wife of an eminent surgeon had some talent for

drawing. Her husband wrote a treatise on cancer; and she drew the

illustrations. It was the first time she had used her gift for

a serious purpose; and she worked hard enough at it to acquire

considerable skill in depicting cancerous proliferation. The book being

finished and published, she resumed her ordinary practice of sketching

for pleasure. But all her work now had an uncanny look. When she drew

a landscape, it was like a cancer that accidentally looked like a

landscape. She had acquired a cancerous technique; and she could not

get rid of it.

This happens as easily in literature as in the other arts. The men

who trained themselves as writers by dragging the unmentionable to

light, presently found that they could do that so much better than

anything else that they gave up dealing with the other subjects. Even

their quite mentionable episodes had an unmentionable air. Their

imitators assumed that unmentionability was an end in itself—that to

be decent was to be out of the movement. Zola and Ibsen could not,

of course, be confined to mere reaction against taboo. Ibsen was to

the last fascinating and full of a strange moving beauty; and Zola

often broke into sentimental romance. But neither Ibsen nor Zola,

after they once took in hand the work of unmasking the idols of the

bourgeoisie, ever again wrote a happy or pleasant play or novel.

Ibsen’s suicides and catastrophes at last produced the cry of ‘People

don’t do such things,’ which he ridiculed through Judge Brack in Hedda

Gabler. This was easy enough: Brack was so far wrong that people do

do such things occasionally. But on the whole Brack was right. The

tragedy of Hedda in real life is not that she commits suicide but that

she continues to live. If such acts of violent rebellion as those of

Hedda and Nora and Rebecca and the rest were the inevitable or even

the probable consequences of their unfitness to be wives and mothers,

or of their contracting repugnant marriages to avoid being left on

the shelf, social reform would be very rapid; and we should hear less

nonsense as to women like Nora and Hedda being mere figments of Ibsen’s

imagination. Our real difficulty is the almost boundless docility and

submission to social convention which is characteristic of the human

race. What baulks the social reformer everywhere is that the victims of

social evils do not complain, and even strongly resent being treated as

victims. The more a dog suffers from being chained the more dangerous

it is to release him: he bites savagely at the hand that dares touch

his collar. Our Rougon-Macquart families are usually enormously proud

of themselves; and though they have to put up with their share of

drunkards and madmen, they do not proliferate into Jack-the-Rippers.

Nothing that is admittedly and unmistakeably horrible matters very

much, because it frightens people into seeking a remedy: the serious

horrors are those which seem entirely respectable and normal to

respectable and normal men. Now the formula of tragedy had come down

to the nineteenth century from days in which this was not recognized,

and when life was so thoroughly accepted as a divine institution that

in order to make it seem tragic, something dreadful had to happen and

somebody had to die. But the tragedy of modern life is that nothing

happens, and that the resultant dulness does not kill. Maupassant’s Une

Vie is infinitely more tragic than the death of Juliet.

In Ibsen’s works we find the old traditions and the new conditions

struggling in the same play, like a gudgeon half swallowed by a pike.

Almost all the sorrow and the weariness which makes his plays so

poignant are the sorrow and weariness of the mean dull life in which

nothing happens; but none the less he provides a final catastrophe

of the approved fifth-act-blank-verse type. Hedwig and Hedda shoot

themselves: Rosmer and Rebecca throw themselves into the mill-race:

Solness and Rubeck are dashed to pieces: Borkman dies of acute stage

tragedy without discoverable lesions. I will not again say, as I have

said before, that these catastrophes are forced, because a fortunate

performance often makes them seem inevitable; but I do submit that the

omission of them would leave the play sadder and more convincing.

The Passing of the Tragic Catastrophe and the Happy Ending.

Not only is the tradition of the catastrophe unsuitable to modern

studies of life: the tradition of an ending, happy or the reverse, is

equally unworkable. The moment the dramatist gives up accidents and

catastrophes, and takes ‘slices of life’ as his material, he finds

himself committed to plays that have no endings. The curtain no longer

comes down on a hero slain or married: it comes down when the audience

has seen enough of the life presented to it to draw the moral, and must

either leave the theatre or miss its last train.

The man who faced France with a drama fulfilling all these conditions

was Brieux. He was as scientific, as conscientious, as unflinching as

Zola without being in the least morbid. He was no more dependent on

horrors than Molière, and as sane in his temper. He threw over the

traditional forced catastrophe uncompromisingly. You do not go away

from a Brieux play with the feeling that the affair is finished or the

problem solved for you by the dramatist. Still less do you go away

in ‘that happy, easy, ironically indulgent frame of mind that is the

true test of comedy’, as Mr. Walkley put it in The Times of the 1st

October 1909. You come away with a very disquieting sense that you are

involved in the affair, and must find the way out of it for yourself

and everybody else if civilization is to be tolerable to your sense of

honor.

The Difference between Brieux and Molière or Shakespear.

Brieux’s task is thus larger than Molière’s. Molière destroyed the

prestige of those conspiracies against society which we call the

professions, and which thrive by the exploitation of idolatry. He

unmasked the doctor, the philosopher, the fencing master, the priest.

He ridiculed their dupes: the hypochondriac, the academician, the

devotee, the gentleman in search of accomplishments. He exposed

the snob: he shewed the gentleman as the butt and creature of his

valet, emphasizing thus the inevitable relation between the man who

lives by unearned money and the man who lives by weight of service.

Beyond bringing this latter point up to a later date Beaumarchais did

nothing. But Molière never indicted society. Burke said that you cannot

bring an indictment against a nation; yet within a generation from

that utterance men began to draw indictments against whole epochs,

especially against the capitalistic epoch. It is true that Molière,

like Shakespear, indicted human nature, which would seem to be a

broader attack; but such attacks only make thoughtful men melancholy

and hopeless, and practical men cynical or murderous. Le Misanthrope,

which seems to me, as a foreigner perhaps, to be Molière’s dullest and

worst play, is like Hamlet in two respects. The first, which is that it

would have been much better if it had been written in prose, is merely

technical and need not detain us. The second is that the author does

not clearly know what he is driving at. Le Festin de Pierre, Molière’s

best philosophic play, is as brilliant and arresting as Le Misanthrope

is neither the one nor the other; but here again there is no positive

side: the statue is a hollow creature with nothing to say for himself;

and Don Juan makes no attempt to take advantage of his weakness.

The reason why Shakespear and Molière are always well spoken of and

recommended to the young is that their quarrel is really a quarrel with

God for not making men better. If they had quarrelled with a specified

class of persons with incomes of four figures for not doing their

work better, or for doing no work at all, they would be denounced as

seditious, impious, and profligate corruptors of morality.

Brieux wastes neither ink nor indignation on Providence. The idle

despair that shakes its fist impotently at the skies, uttering sublime

blasphemies, such as

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods:

They kill us for their sport,’

does not amuse Brieux. His fisticuffs are not aimed heavenward: they

fall on human noses for the good of human souls. When he sees human

nature in conflict with a political abuse he does not blame human

nature, knowing that such blame is the favorite trick of those who

wish to perpetuate the abuse without being able to defend it. He does

not even blame the abuse: he exposes it, and then leaves human nature

to tackle it with its eyes open. And his method of exposure is the

dramatic method. He is a born dramatist, differing from the ordinary

dramatists only in that he has a large mind and a scientific habit

of using it. As a dramatist he must take for his theme a conflict of

some sort. As a dramatist of large mind he cannot be satisfied with

the trumpery conflicts of the Divorce Court and the Criminal Court:

of the husband with the seducer, of the policeman with the murderer.

Having the scientific conscience in a higher degree than Zola (he has

a better head), he cannot be interested in imaginary conflicts which

he himself would have to invent like a child at play. The conflict

which inspires his dramatic genius must be a big one and a real one. To

ask an audience to spend three hours hanging on the question of which

particular man some particular woman shall mate with does not strike

him as a reasonable proceeding; and if the audience does not agree with

him, why, it can go to some fashionable dramatist of the boulevard who

does agree with it.

Brieux and the Boulevard.

This involves Brieux in furious conflict with the boulevard. Up to

quite recent times it was impossible for an Englishman to mention

Brieux to a Parisian as the only French playwright who really counted

in Europe without being met with astonished assurances that Brieux

is not a playwright at all; that his plays are not plays; that he is

not (in Sarcey’s sense of the phrase) ‘du théâtre’; that he is a mere

pamphleteer without even literary style. And when you expressed your

natural gratification at learning that the general body of Parisian

dramatists were so highly gifted that Brieux counted for nothing in

Paris—when you respectfully asked for the names of a few of the most

prominent of the geniuses who had eclipsed him, you were given three

or four of which you had never heard, and one or two known to you as

those of cynically commercial manipulators of the _ménage à trois_, the

innocent wife discovered at the villain’s rooms at midnight (to beg him

to spare the virtue of a sister, the character of a son, or the life

of a father), the compromising letter, the duel, and all the rest of

the claptraps out of which dramatic playthings can be manufactured for

the amusement of grown-up children. Not until the Academie Française

elected Brieux did it occur to the boulevardiers that the enormous

difference between him and their pet authors was a difference in which

the superiority lay with Brieux.

The Pedantry of Paris.

Indeed it is difficult for the Englishman to understand how bigotedly

the Parisians cling to the claptrap theatre. The English do not care

enough about the theatre to cling to its traditions or persecute anyone

for their sake; but the French do. Besides, in fine art, France is

a nation of born pedants. The vulgar English painter paints vulgar

pictures, and generally sells them. But the vulgar French painter

paints classical ones, though whether he sells them or not I do not

know: I hope not. The corresponding infatuation in the theatre is for

dramas in alexandrines; and alexandrines are far worse than English

blank verse, which is saying a good deal. Racine and Corneille,

who established the alexandrine tradition, deliberately aimed at

classicism, taking the Greek drama as their model. Even a foreigner

can hear the music of their verse. Corneille wrote alexandrines as

Dryden wrote heroic couplets, in a virile, stately, handsome and withal

human way; and Racine had tenderness and beauty as well. This drama of

Racine and Corneille, with the music of Gluck, gave the French in the

XVII and XVIII centuries a body of art which was very beautiful, very

refined, very delightful for cultivated people, and very tedious for

the ignorant. When, through the spread of elementary education, the

ignorant invaded the theatre in overwhelming numbers, this exquisite

body of art became a dead body, and was practised by nobody except the

amateurs—the people who love what has been already done in art and

loathe the real life out of which living art must continually grow

afresh. In their hands it passed from being a commercial failure to

being an obsolete nuisance.

Commercially, the classic play was supplanted by a nuisance which was

not a failure: to wit, the ‘well made play’ of Scribe and his school.

The manufacture of well made plays is not an art: it is an industry.

It is not at all hard for a literary mechanic to acquire it: the only

difficulty is to find a literary mechanic who is not by nature too

much of an artist for the job; for nothing spoils a well made play

more infallibly than the least alloy of high art or the least qualm

of conscience on the part of the writer. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is the

formula of the well made play, meaning in practice ‘Success for money’s

sake.’ Now great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too

difficult to be worth the effort. All the great artists enter into a

terrible struggle with the public, often involving bitter poverty and

personal humiliation, and always involving calumny and persecution,

because they believe they are apostles doing what used to be called the

Will of God, and is now called by many prosaic names, of which ‘public

work’ is the least controversial. And when these artists have travailed

and brought forth, and at last forced the public to associate keen

pleasure and deep interest with their methods and morals, a crowd

of smaller men—art confectioners, we may call them—hasten to make

pretty entertainments out of scraps and crumbs from the masterpieces.

Offenbach laid hands on Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and produced

J’aime les militaires, to the disgust of Schumann, who was nevertheless

doing precisely the same thing in a more pretentious way. And these

confectioners are by no means mere plagiarists. They bring all sorts

of engaging qualities to their work: love of beauty, desire to give

pleasure, tenderness, humor, everything except the high republican

conscience, the identification of the artist’s purpose with the purpose

of the universe, which alone makes an artist great.

But the well made play was not confectionery: it had not even the

derived virtue of being borrowed from the great playwrights. Its

formula grew up in the days when the spread of elementary schooling

produced a huge mass of playgoers sufficiently educated to want plays

instead of dog-fights, but not educated enough to enjoy or understand

the masterpieces of dramatic art. Besides, education or no education,

one cannot live on masterpieces alone, not only because there are

not enough of them, but because new plays as well as great plays are

needed, and there are not enough Molières and Shakespears in the world

to keep the demand for novelty satisfied. Hence it has always been

necessary to have some formula by which men of mediocre talent and

no conscience can turn out plays for the theatrical market. Such men

have written melodramas since the theatre existed. It was in the XIX

century that the demand for manufactured plays was extended to drawing

room plays in which the Forest of Bondy and the Auberge des Adrets, the

Red Barn and the Cave at Midnight, had to be replaced by Lord Blank’s

flat in Whitehall Court and the Great Hall, Chevy Chace. Playgoers,

being by that time mostly poor playgoers, wanted to see how the rich

live; wanted to see them actually drinking champagne and wearing real

fashionable dresses and trousers with a neatly ironed crease down the

knee.

How to Write a Popular Play.

The formula for the well made play is so easy that I give it for the

benefit of any reader who feels tempted to try his hand at making the

fortune that awaits all successful manufacturers in this line. First,

you ‘have an idea’ for a dramatic situation. If it strikes you as a

splendidly original idea whilst it is in fact as old as the hills, so

much the better. For instance, the situation of an innocent person

convicted by circumstances of a crime may always be depended on. If

the person is a woman, she must be convicted of adultery. If a young

officer, he must be convicted of selling information to the enemy,

though it is really a fascinating female spy who has ensnared him and

stolen the incriminating document. If the innocent wife, banished from

her home, suffers agonies through her separation from her children,

and, when one of them is dying (of any disease the dramatist chooses to

inflict), disguises herself as a nurse and attends it through its dying

convulsion until the doctor, who should be a serio-comic character,

and if possible a faithful old admirer of the lady’s, simultaneously

announces the recovery of the child and the discovery of the wife’s

innocence, the success of the play may be regarded as assured if the

writer has any sort of knack for his work. Comedy is more difficult,

because it requires a sense of humor and a good deal of vivacity;

but the process is essentially the same: it is the manufacture of a

misunderstanding. Having manufactured it, you place its culmination

at the end of the last act but one, which is the point at which the

manufacture of the play begins. Then you make your first act out of

the necessary introduction of the characters to the audience, after

elaborate explanations, mostly conducted by servants, solicitors,

and other low life personages (the principals must all be dukes and

colonels and millionaires), of how the misunderstanding is going to

come about. Your last act consists, of course, of clearing up the

misunderstanding, and generally getting the audience out of the theatre

as best you can.

Now please do not misunderstand me as pretending that this process is

so mechanical that it offers no opportunity for the exercise of talent.

On the contrary, it is so mechanical that without very conspicuous

talent nobody can make much reputation by doing it, though some can and

do make a living at it. And this often leads the cultivated classes

to suppose that all plays are written by authors of talent. As a

matter of fact the majority of those who in France and England make

a living by writing plays are unknown and, as to education, all but

illiterate. Their names are not worth putting on the playbill, because

their audiences neither know nor care who the author is, and often

believe that the actors improvise the whole piece, just as they in fact

do sometimes improvise the dialogue. To rise out of this obscurity

you must be a Scribe or a Sardou, doing essentially the same thing,

it is true, but doing it wittily and ingeniously, at moments almost

poetically, and giving the persons of the drama some touches of real

observed character.

Why the Critics are always Wrong.

Now it is these strokes of talent that set the critics wrong. For the

talent, being all expended on the formula, at last consecrates the

formula in the eyes of the critics. Nay, they become so accustomed

to the formula that at last they cannot relish or understand a play

that has grown naturally, just as they cannot admire the Venus of Milo

because she has neither a corset nor high heeled shoes. They are like

the peasants who are so accustomed to food reeking with garlic that

when food is served to them without it they declare that it has no

taste and is not food at all.

This is the explanation of the refusal of the critics of all nations

to accept great original dramatists like Ibsen and Brieux as real

dramatists, or their plays as real plays. No writer of the first

order needs the formula any more than a sound man needs a crutch.

In his simplest mood, when he is only seeking to amuse, he does not

manufacture a plot: he tells a story. He finds no difficulty in setting

people on the stage to talk and act in an amusing, exciting or touching

way. His characters have adventures and ideas which are interesting in

themselves, and need not be fitted into the Chinese puzzle of a plot.

The Interpreter of Life.

But the great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either

himself or his audience. He has to interpret life. This sounds a mere

pious phrase of literary criticism; but a moment’s consideration will

discover its meaning and its exactitude. Life as it appears to us in

our daily experience is an unintelligible chaos of happenings. You

pass Othello in the bazaar in Aleppo, Iago on the jetty in Cyprus, and

Desdemona in the nave of St. Mark’s in Venice without the slightest

clue to their relations to one another. The man you see stepping into

a chemist’s shop to buy the means of committing murder or suicide,

may, for all you know, want nothing but a liver pill or a toothbrush.

The statesman who has no other object than to make you vote for his

party at the next election may be starting you on an incline at the

foot of which lies war, or revolution, or a smallpox epidemic, or five

years off your lifetime. The horrible murder of a whole family by the

father who finishes by killing himself, or the driving of a young girl

on to the streets, may be the result of your discharging an employee

in a fit of temper a month before. To attempt to understand life from

merely looking on at it as it happens in the streets is as hopeless as

trying to understand public questions by studying snapshots of public

demonstrations. If we possessed a series of cinematographs of all

the executions during the Reign of Terror, they might be exhibited

a thousand times without enlightening the audiences in the least as

to the meaning of the Revolution: Robespierre would perish as ‘un

monsieur’ and Marie Antoinette as ‘une femme.’ Life as it occurs is

senseless: a policeman may watch it and work in it for thirty years in

the streets and courts of Paris without learning as much of it or from

it as a child or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux. For it

is the business of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents from

the chaos of daily happenings, and arrange them so that their relation

to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered

spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of

the world and its destinies. This is the highest function that man

can perform—the greatest work he can set his hand to; and this is why

the great dramatists of the world, from Euripides and Aristophanes to

Shakespear and Molière, and from them to Ibsen and Brieux, take that

majestic and pontifical rank which seems so strangely above all the

reasonable pretensions of mere strolling actors and theatrical authors.

How the Great Dramatists torture the Public.

Now if the critics are wrong in supposing that the formula of the well

made play is not only an indispensable factor in playwriting, but is

actually the essence of the play itself—if their delusion is rebuked

and confuted by the practice of every great dramatist even when he is

only amusing himself by story telling, what must happen to their poor

formula when it impertinently offers its services to a playwright who

has taken on his supreme function as the Interpreter of Life? Not only

has he no use for it; but he must attack and destroy it; for one of

the very first lessons he has to teach to a play-ridden public is that

the romantic conventions on which the formula proceeds are all false,

and are doing incalculable harm in these days when everybody reads

romances and goes to the theatre. Just as the historian can teach no

real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion

that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and

having her head cut off; so the playwright of the first order can do

nothing with his audiences until he has cured them of looking at the

stage through the keyhole and sniffing round the theatre as prurient

people sniff round the divorce court. The cure is not a popular one.

The public suffers from it exactly as a drunkard or a snuff taker

suffers from an attempt to conquer the habit. The critics especially,

who are forced by their profession to indulge immoderately in plays

adulterated with falsehood and vice, suffer so acutely when deprived

of them for a whole evening that they hurl disparagements and even

abuse and insult at the merciless dramatist who is torturing them.

To a bad play of the kind they are accustomed to they can be cruel

through superciliousness, irony, impatience, contempt, or even a

Rochefoucauldian pleasure in a friend’s misfortune. But the hatred

provoked by deliberately inflicted pain, the frantic denials as of a

prisoner at the bar accused of a disgraceful crime, the clamor for

vengeance thinly disguised as artistic justice, the suspicion that the

dramatist is using private information and making a personal attack:

all these are to be found only when the playwright is no mere _marchand

de plaisir_, but, like Brieux, a ruthless revealer of hidden truth and

a mighty destroyer of idols.

Brieux’s Conquest of London.

So well does Brieux know this that he has written a play, La Foi,

showing how truth is terrible to men, and how false religions

(theatrical romance, by the way, is the falsest and most fantastically

held of all the false religions) are a necessity to them. With this

play he achieved, for the first time on record, the feat of winning

a success in a fashionable London theatre with a cold-blooded thesis

play. Those who witnessed the performance of False Gods at His

Majesty’s Theatre this year were astonished to see that exceptionally

large theatre filled with strangely attentive ordinary playgoers, to

whose customary requirements and weaknesses no concession was made for

a moment by the playwright. They were getting a lesson and nothing

else. The same famous acting, the same sumptuous _mise en scène_, had

not always saved other plays from failure. There was no enthusiasm:

one might almost say there was no enjoyment. The audience for once had

something better to do than to amuse themselves. The old playgoers

and the critics, who, on the first night, had politely regretted an

inevitable failure after waiting, like the maturer ladies at the sack

of Ismail in Byron’s poem, for the adultery to begin, asked one another

incredulously whether there could really be money in this sort of

thing. Such feats had been performed before at coterie theatres where

the expenses were low and where the plays were seasoned with a good

deal of ordinary amusing comedy; but in this play there was not a jest

from beginning to end; and the size of the theatre and the expenses

of production were on a princely scale. Yet La Foi held its own. The

feat was quite unprecedented; and that it should have been achieved for

the first time by a Frenchman is about a million times more remarkable

than that the first man to fly across the channel (the two events were

almost simultaneous) should also have been a Frenchman.

Parisian Stupidity.

And here I must digress for a moment to remark that though Paris is

easily the most prejudiced, old-fashioned, obsolete-minded city in the

west of Europe, yet when she produces great men she certainly does not

do it by halves. Unfortunately, there is nothing she hates more than a

Frenchman of genius. When an Englishman says that you have to go back

to Michael Angelo to find a sculptor who can be mentioned in the same

breath as Rodin without manifest absurdity, the Parisians indignantly

exclaim that only an ignorant foreigner could imagine that a man who

was not a pupil at the Beaux Arts could possibly be a sculptor at all.

And I have already described how they talk about Brieux, the only

French dramatist whose fame crosses frontiers and channels, and fills

the continent. To be quite frank, I cannot to this day understand why

they made him an Academician instead of starving him to death and

then giving him a statue. Can it be that in his early days, before he

could gain his living by the theatre, he wrote a spelling book, or

delivered a course of lectures on the use of pure line in Greek design?

To suppose that they did it because he is a great man is to imply that

they know a great Frenchman when they see him, which is contrary to all

experience. They never know until the English tell them.

Brieux and the English Theatre.

In England our knowledge of Brieux has been delayed by the childishness

of our theatre. This childishness is by no means to be deplored: it

means that the theatre is occupied with the elementary education of the

masses instead of with the higher education of the classes. Those who

desire dramatic performances of the higher sort have procured them only

by forming clubs, hiring theatres, engaging performers, and selecting

plays for themselves. After 1889, when Ibsen first became known in

London through A Doll’s House, a succession of these clubs kept what

may be called the serious adult drama fitfully alive until 1904, when

Messrs. Vedrenne and Barker took the field with a regular theatrical

enterprise devoted to this class of work, and maintained it until the

National Theatre project was set on foot, and provisional repertory

schemes were announced by established commercial managements. It was

through one of these clubs, the Stage Society, that Brieux reached the

English stage with his Bienfaiteurs. Then the first two plays in this

volume were performed, and, later on, Les Hannetons. These performances

settled for English connoisseurs the question of Brieux’s rank among

modern playwrights. Later on his Robe Rouge introduced the ordinary

playgoers to him; and he is now no longer one of the curiosities of the

coterie theatre, as even Ibsen to some extent still is, but one of the

conquerors of the general British public.

The Censorship in France and England.

Unfortunately, he has not yet been able to conquer our detestable,

discredited, but still all-powerful censorship. In France he was

attacked by the censorship just as in England; but in France the

censorship broke itself against him and perished. The same thing would

probably have occurred here but for the fact that our Censor, by a

grotesque accident of history—to be precise, because Henry VIII. began

the censorship of the theatre by appointing an officer of his own

household to do the work—remains part of the King’s retinue; and his

abolition involves the curtailment of that retinue and therefore the

reduction of the King’s State, always a very difficult and delicate

matter in a monarchical country. In France the censorship was exercised

by the Minister of Fine Arts (a portfolio that does not exist in our

Cabinet) and was in the hands of two or three examiners of plays, who

necessarily behaved exactly like our Mr. Redford; for, as I have so

often pointed out, the evils of censorship are made compulsory by the

nature of the office, and are not really the fault of the individual

censor. These gentlemen, then, prohibited the performance of Brieux’s

best and most useful plays just as Mr. Redford did here. But as the

French Parliament, having nobody to consider but themselves and the

interests of the nation, presently refused to vote the salaries of the

Censors, the institution died a natural death. We have no such summary

remedy here. Our Censor’s salary is part of the King’s civil list, and

is therefore sacred. Years ago, our Playgoers’ Club asked me how the

censorship could be abolished. I replied, to the great scandal of that

loyal body: You must begin by abolishing the monarchy.

Brieux and the English Censorship.

Nevertheless, Brieux has left his mark even on the English censorship.

This year (1909) the prohibition of his plays was one of the strongest

items in the long list of grievances by which the English playwrights

compelled the Government to appoint a Select Committee of both houses

of Parliament to enquire into the working of the censorship. The

report of that Committee admits the charge brought against the Censor

of systematically suppressing plays dealing seriously with social

problems whilst allowing frivolous and even pornographic plays to

pass unchallenged. It advises that the submission of plays to the

Censor shall in future be optional, though it does not dare to omit

the customary sycophantic recommendation that the Lord Chamberlain

shall still retain his privilege of licensing plays; and it proposes

that the authors and managers of plays so licensed, though not exempt

from prosecution, shall enjoy certain immunities denied in the case of

unlicensed plays. There are many other conditions which need not be

gone into here; but to a Frenchman the main fact that stands out is

that the accident which has made the Censor an officer of the King’s

Household has prevented a parliamentary committee from recommending the

abolition of his control over the theatre in a report which not only

has not a word to say in his defence, but expressly declares that his

license affords the public no guarantee that the plays he approves are

decent, and that authors of serious plays need protection against his

unenlightened despotism.

Taboo.

We may therefore take it on the authority of the Select Committee that

the prohibition by the English censorship of the public performances of

the three plays in this book does not afford the smallest reasonable

ground for condemning them as improper—rather the contrary. As a matter

of fact, most men, if asked to guess the passages to which the Censor

took exception, would guess wrongly. Certainly a Frenchman would. The

reason is that though in England as in France what is called decency is

not a reasoned discrimination between what needs to be said and what

ought not to be said, but simply the observance of a set of taboos,

these taboos are not the same in England as in France. A Frenchman of

scrupulously correct behavior will sometimes quite innocently make an

English lady blush by mentioning something that is unmentionable in

polite society in England though quite mentionable in France. To take

a simple illustration, an Englishman, when he first visits France, is

always embarrassed, and sometimes shocked, on finding that the person

in charge of a public lavatory for men is a woman. I cannot give

reciprocal instances of the ways in which Englishmen shock the French

nation, because I am happily unconscious of all the _cochonneries_

of which I am no doubt guilty when I am in France. But that I do

occasionally shock the brave French bourgeois to the very marrow of his

bones by my indelicacy, I have not the smallest doubt. There is only

one epithet in universal use for foreigners. That epithet is ‘dirty.’

The Attitude of the People to the Literary Arts.

These differences between nation and nation also exist between class

and class and between town and country. I will not here go into the

vexed question of whether the peasant’s way of blowing his nose or

the squire’s is the more cleanly and hygienic, though my experience

as a municipal councillor of the way in which epidemics are spread

by laundries makes me incline to the side of the peasant. What is

beyond all question is that each seems disgusting to the other. And

when we come from physical facts to moral views and ethical opinions

we find the same antagonisms. To a great section—perhaps the largest

section—of the people of England and France, all novels, plays, and

songs are licentious; and the habit of enjoying them is a mark of a

worthless character. To these people the distinctions made by the

literary classes between books fit for young girls to read and improper

books—between Paul and Virginia and Mademoiselle de Maupin or Une Vie,

between Mrs. Humphry Ward and Ouida—have no meaning: all writers of

love stories and all readers of them are alike shameless. Cultivated

Paris, cultivated London, are apt to overlook people who, as they

seldom read and never write, have no means of making themselves heard.

But such simple people heavily outnumber the cultivated; and if they

could also outwit them, literature would perish. Yet their intolerance

of fiction is as nothing to their intolerance of fact. I lately heard

an English gentleman state a very simple fact in these terms: ‘I never

could get on with my mother: she did not like me; and I did not like

her: my brother was her pet.’ To an immense number of living English

and French people this speech would suggest that its utterer ought

to be burned alive, though the substitution of stepmother for mother

and of half-brother for brother would suffice to make it seem quite

probable and natural. And this, observe, not in the least because all

these horrified people adore and are adored by their mothers, but

simply because they have a fixed convention that the proper name of the

relation between mother and son is love. However bitter and hostile it

may in fact be in some cases, to call it by any other name is a breach

of convention; and by the instinctive logic of timidity they infer

that a man to whom convention is not sacred is a dangerous man. To them

the ten commandments are nothing but arbitrary conventions; and the man

who says today that he does not love his mother may, they conclude,

tomorrow steal, rob, murder, commit adultery, and bear false witness

against his neighbor.

The Dread of the Original Thinker.

This is the real secret of the terror inspired by an original thinker.

In repudiating convention he is repudiating that on which his neighbors

are relying for their sense of security. But he is usually also doing

something even more unpopular. He is proposing new obligations to add

to the already heavy burden of duty. When the boy Shelley elaborately

and solemnly cursed his father for the entertainment of his friends, he

only shocked us. But when the man Shelley told us that we should feed,

clothe and educate all the children in the country as carefully as if

they were our immediate own, we lost our tempers with him and deprived

him of the custody of his own children.

It is useless to complain that the conventional masses are

unintelligent. To begin with, they are not unintelligent except in

the sense in which all men are unintelligent in matters in which they

are not experts. I object to be called unintelligent merely because

I do not know enough about mechanical construction to be able to

judge whether a motor car of new design is an improvement or not, and

therefore prefer to buy one of the old type to which I am accustomed.

The brave bourgeois whom Brieux scandalizes must not be dismissed

with ridicule by the man of letters because, not being an expert in

morals, he prefers the old ways and mistrusts the new. His position is

a very reasonable one. He says, in effect, ‘If I am to enjoy any sense

of security, I must be able to reckon on other people behaving in a

certain ascertained way. Never mind whether it is the ideally right way

or the ideally wrong way: it will suit me well enough if only it is

convenient and, above all, unmistakeable. Lay it down if you like that

people are not to pay debts and are to murder one another whenever they

get a chance. In that case I can refuse to give credit and can carry

weapons and learn to use them to defend myself. On the other hand, if

you settle that debts are to be enforced and the peace kept by the

police, I will give credit and renounce the practice of arms. But the

one thing that I cannot stand is not knowing what the social contract

is.’

The Justification of Conventionality.

It is a cherished tradition in English politics that at a meeting of

Lord Melbourne’s Cabinet in the early days of Queen Victoria, the Prime

Minister, when the meeting threatened to break up in confusion, put

his back to the door and said, in the cynically profane manner then

fashionable: ‘Gentlemen: we can tell the House the truth or we can tell

it a lie: I do not care a damn which. All I insist on is that we shall

all tell the same lie; and you shall not leave the room until you have

settled what it is to be.’ Just so does the bourgeois perceive that

the essential thing is not whether a convention is right or wrong, but

that everybody shall know what it is and observe it. His cry is always:

‘I want to know where I stand.’ Tell him what he may do and what he

may not do; and make him feel that he may depend on other people doing

or not doing the same; and he feels secure, knowing where he stands

and where other people stand. His dread and hatred of revolutions and

heresies and men with original ideas is his dread of disorientation

and insecurity. Those who have felt earthquakes assure us that there

is no terror like the terror of the earth swaying under the feet that

have always depended on it as the one immovable thing in the world.

That is just how the ordinary respectable man feels when some man of

genius rocks the moral ground beneath him by denying the validity of a

convention. The popular phrases by which such innovators are described

are always of the same kind. The early Christians were called men who

wished to turn the world upside down. The modern critics of morals

are reproached for ‘standing on their heads.’ There is no pretence of

argument, or of any understanding of the proposals of the reformers:

there is simply panic and a demand for suppression at all costs. The

reformer is not forbidden to advance this or that definite opinion,

because his assailants are too frightened to know or care what his

opinions are: he is forbidden simply to speak in an unusual way about

morals and religion, or to mention any subject that is not usually

mentioned in public.

This is the terror which the English censorship, like all other

censorships, gives effect to. It explains what puzzles most observers

of the censorship so much: namely, its scandalous laxity towards and

positive encouragement of the familiar and customary pornographic

side of theatrical art simultaneously with its intolerance of the

higher drama, which is always unconventional and super-bourgeois in

its ethics. To illustrate, let me cite the point on which the English

censorship came into conflict with Brieux, when Les Hannetons was first

performed by the Stage Society.

Why Les Hannetons was Censored.

Les Hannetons is a very powerful and convincing demonstration of

the delusiveness of that sort of freedom which men try to secure by

refusing to marry, and living with a mistress instead. The play is a

comedy: the audience laughs throughout; but the most dissolute man

present leaves the theatre convinced that the unfortunate hero had

better have been married ten times over than fallen into such bondage

as his liaison has landed him in. To witness a performance might very

wisely be made part of the curriculum of every university college and

polytechnic in the country.

Now those who do not know the ways of the censorship may jump to the

conclusion that the objection of the Censor was to the exhibition on

the stage of two persons living together in immoral relations. They

would be greatly mistaken. The censor made no difficulty whatever about

that. Even the funny but ruthless scene where the woman cajoles the

man by kissing him on a certain susceptible spot on his neck—a scene

from which our shamed conscience shrinks as from a branding iron—was

licensed without a word of remonstrance. But there is a searching

passage in the play where the woman confesses to a girl friend that one

of the lies by which she induced the man to enter into relations with

her was that he was not her first lover. The friend is simple enough

to express surprise, thinking that this, far from being an inducement,

would have roused jealousy and disgust. The woman replies that, on

the contrary, no man likes to face the responsibility of tempting a

girl to her first step from the beaten path, and that girls take care

accordingly not to let them know it.

This is one of those terrible stripping strokes by which a master of

realism suddenly exposes a social sore which has been plastered over

with sentimental nonsense about erring Magdalens, vicious nonsense

about gaiety, or simply prudish silence. No young man or young woman

hearing it, however anarchical their opinions may be as to sexual

conduct, can possibly imagine afterwards that the relation between

‘les hannetons’ is honest, charming, sentimentally interesting, or

pardonable by the self-respect of either. It is felt instinctively

to have something fundamentally dishonorable in it, in spite of the

innocence of the natural affection of the pair for one another. Yet

this is precisely the passage that the Censor refused to pass. All the

rest was duly licensed. The exhibition of the pretty, scheming, lying,

sensual girl fixing herself with triumphant success on the meanly

prudent sensual man, and having what many women would consider rather

a good time of it, was allowed and encouraged by the court certificate

of propriety. But the deadly touch that made it impossible for even the

most thoughtless pair in the audience to go and do likewise without

loathing themselves, was forbidden.

Misadventure of a Frenchman in Westminster Abbey.

In short, the censorship did what it always does: it left the poison on

the table and carefully locked up the antidote. And it did this, not

from a fiendish design to destroy the souls of the people, but solely

because the passage involved a reference by a girl to her virginity,

which is unusual and therefore tabooed. The Censor never troubled

himself as to the meaning or effect of the passage. It represented

the woman as doing an unusual thing: therefore a dangerous, possibly

subversive thing. In England, when we are scandalized and can give no

direct reason why, we exclaim ‘What next?’ That is the continual cry of

the Censor’s soul. If a girl may refer to her virginity on the stage,

what may she not refer to? This instinctive regard to consequences

was once impressed painfully on a pious Frenchman who, in Westminster

Abbey, knelt down to pray. The verger, who had never seen such a thing

happen before, promptly handed him over to the police and charged him

with ‘brawling.’ Fortunately, the magistrate had compassion on the

foreigner’s ignorance; and even went the length of asking why he should

not be allowed to pray in church. The reply of the verger was simple

and obvious. ‘If we allowed that,’ he said, ‘we should have people

praying all over the place.’ And to this day the rule in Westminster

Abbey is that you may stroll about and look at the monuments; but you

must not on any account pray. Similarly, on the stage you may represent

murder, gluttony, sexual vice, and all the crimes in the calendar and

out of it; but you must not say anything unusual about them.

Marriage and Malthus.

If Brieux found himself blocked by the censorship when he was exposing

the vice of illicit unions, it will surprise no one to learn that his

far more urgently needed exposures of the intemperance and corruption

of marriage itself was fiercely banned. The vulgar, and consequently

the official, view of marriage is that it hallows all the sexual

relations of the parties to it. That it may mask all the vices of the

coarsest libertinage with added elements of slavery and cruelty has

always been true to some extent; but during the last forty years it

has become so serious a matter that conscientious dramatists have to

vivisect legal unions as ruthlessly as illegal ones. For it happens

that just about forty years ago the propaganda of Neo-Malthusianism

changed the bearing of children from an involuntary condition of

marriage to a voluntary one. From the moment this momentous discovery

was made, childless marriage became available to male voluptuaries

as the cheapest way of keeping a mistress, and to female ones as the

most convenient and respectable way of being kept in idle luxury by a

man. The effects of this have already been startling, and will yet be

revolutionary as far as marriage is concerned, both in law and custom.

The work of keeping the populations of Europe replenished received a

sudden check, amounting in France and England to a threat of actual

retrogression. The appointment of a Royal Commission to enquire into

the decline of the birth-rate in the very sections of the population

which most need to be maintained, is probably not very far off: the

more far-seeing of those who know the facts have prophesied such a step

for a long time past. The expectation of the Neo-Malthusians that the

regulation of births in our families would give the fewer children born

a better chance of survival in greater numbers and in fuller health

and efficiency than the children of the old unrestricted families and

of the mother exhausted by excessive childbearing has no doubt been

fulfilled in some cases; but, on the whole, artificial sterility seems

to be beating natural fertility; for as far as can be judged by certain

sectional but typical private censuses, the average number of children

produced is being dragged down to one and a half per family by the

large proportion of intentionally childless marriages, and the heavy

pressure of the cost of private childbearing on the scanty incomes of

the masses.

That this will force us to a liberal State endowment of parentage,

direct or indirect, is not now doubted by people who understand the

problem: in fact, as I write, the first open step has already been

taken by the Government’s proposal to exempt parents from the full

burden of taxation borne by the childless. There has also begun a

change in public opinion as to the open abuse of marriage as a mere

means by which any pair can procure a certificate of respectability

by paying for it, which may quite possibly end in the disuse of the

ceremony for all except fertile unions. From the point of view of the

Church, it is a manifest profanation that couples whose only aim is a

comfortable domesticity should obtain for it the sacrament of religious

marriage on pretence of unselfish and publicly important purposes

which they have not the smallest intention of carrying out. From the

secular point of view there is no reason why couples who do not intend

to have children should be allowed to enslave one another by all the

complicated legal restrictions of their liberty and property which are

attached to marriage solely to secure the responsibility of parents to

the State for their children.

Brieux and the Respectable Married Man.

All these by no means remote prospects, familiar though they are to

the statesman and sociologist, are amazing to the bourgeois even when

he is personally implicated in the change of practice that is creating

the necessity for a change in law and in opinion. He has changed his

practice privately, without talking about it except in secret, or in

passages of unprintable Rabelaisian jocosity with his friends; and

he is not only unable to see why anyone else should talk publicly

about the change, but terrified lest what he is doing furtively and

hypocritically should be suddenly dragged into the light, and his own

case recorded, perhaps, in public statistics in support of innovations

which vaguely suggest to him the destruction of morals and the break-up

of the family. But both his pruderies and his terrors must give way

before the absolute necessity for re-examining the foundations of our

social structure after the shock they have received from the discovery

of artificial sterilization, and their readjustment to the new strains

they have to bear as a consequence of that discovery.

Tolstoy, with his Kreutzer Sonata, was the first to carry the war into

the enemy’s country by shewing that marriage intensified instead of

eliminating every element of evil in sexual relations; but Brieux was

the first dramatist to see not only the hard facts of the situation,

but its political importance. He has seen in particular that a new

issue has arisen in that eternal conflict of the sexes which is

created by the huge difference between the transient pleasure of

the man and the prolonged suffering of the woman in maintaining the

population. Malthusianism, when it passed from being the speculation

of an economist to being the ardent faith of a devoted band of

propagandists, touched our feelings mainly as a protest against the

burden of excessive childbearing imposed on married women. It was

not then foreseen that the triumph of the propaganda might impose a

still worse burden on them: the burden of enforced sterility. Before

Malthus was born, cases were familiar enough in which wives who had

borne two or three children as an inevitable consequence of their

conjugal relations had thereupon rebelled against further travail and

discontinued the relations by such a resolute assertion of selfishness

as is not easy to an amiable woman and practically not possible to

a loving or a jealous wife. But the case of a man refusing to fulfil

his parental function and thereby denying the right of his wife to

motherhood was unknown. Yet it immediately and inevitably arose

the moment men became possessed of the means of doing this without

self-denial. A wife could thus be put in a position intolerable to a

woman of honor as distinguished from a frank voluptuary. She could be

condemned to barren bodily slavery without remedy. To keep silence

about so monstrous a wrong as this merely because the subject is a

tabooed one was not possible to Brieux. Censorship or no censorship,

it had to be said, and indeed shouted from the housetops if nothing

else would make people attend, that this infamy existed and must be

remedied. And Brieux touched the evil at its worst spot in that section

of the middle class in which the need for pecuniary prudence has almost

swallowed up every more human feeling. In this most wretched of all

classes there is no employment for women except the employment of wife

and mother, and no provision for women without employment. The fathers

are too poor to provide. The daughter must marry whom she can get: if

the first chance, which she dares not refuse, is not that of a man

whom she positively dislikes, she may consider herself fortunate. Her

real hope of affection and self-respect lies in her children. And yet

she above all women is subject to the danger that the dread of poverty

which is the ruling factor in her husband’s world may induce him to

deny her right and frustrate her function of motherhood, using her

simply as a housekeeper and a mistress without paying her the market

price of such luxuries or forfeiting his respectability. To make us

understand what this horror means, Brieux wrote Les Trois Filles de

Monsieur Dupont, or, in equivalent English, The Three Daughters of Mr.

Smith. Mr. Smith, in the person of the Censor, immediately shrieked

‘You must not mention such things.’ Mr. Smith was wrong: they are just

the things that must be mentioned, and mentioned again and yet again,

until they are set right. Surely, of all the anomalies of our marriage

law, there is none more mischievously absurd than that a woman can have

her marriage annulled for her husband’s involuntary, but not for his

voluntary sterility. And the man is in the same predicament, though his

wife now has the same power as he of frustrating the public purpose of

all marriages.

Brieux shews the Other Side.

But Brieux is not, as the ordinary man mostly is, a mere reactionist

against the latest oversights and mistakes, becoming an atheist at

every flaw discovered in popular theology, and recoiling into the

grossest superstition when some Jesuit who happens by exception to be

a clever and subtle man (about the last thing, by the way, that a real

live Jesuit ever is) shews him that popular atheism is only theology

without mind or purpose. The ordinary man, when Brieux makes him aware

of the fact that Malthusianism has produced an unexpected and revolting

situation, instantly conceives a violent prejudice against it, pointing

to the declining population as evidence that it is bringing ruin on the

human race, and clamoring for the return of the conjugal morality of

his grandmother, as Theodore Roosevelt did when he was President of the

United States of America. It therefore became necessary for Brieux to

head him off in his frantic flight by writing another play, Maternity,

to remind him of the case for Malthusianism, and to warn him—if he is

capable of the warning—that progress is not achieved by panic-stricken

rushes back and forward between one folly and another, but by sifting

all movements and adding what survives the sifting to the fabric of our

morality. For the fact that Malthusianism has made new crimes possible

should not discredit it, and cannot stop it, because every step gained

by man in his continuous effort to control Nature necessarily does the

same. Flying, for instance, which has become practical as a general

human art for the first time this year, is capable of such alarming

abuse that we are on the eve of a clamor for its restriction, and even

for its prohibition, that will speedily make the present clamor against

motor cars as completely forgotten as the clamor against bicycles was

when motor cars appeared. But the motor car cannot be suppressed: it

is improving our roads, improving the manners and screwing up the

capacity and conduct of all who use them, improving our regulation

of traffic, improving both locomotion and character as every victory

over Nature finally improves the world and the race. Malthusianism is

no exception to the rule: its obvious abuses, and the new need for

protecting marriage from being made a mere charter of libertinage and

slavery by its means, must be dealt with by improvements in conduct and

law, and not by a hopeless attempt to drive us all back to the time of

Mrs. Gamp. The tyranny which denies to the wife the right to become

a mother has become possible through the discovery of the means of

escape from the no less unbearable tyranny which compelled her to set

another child at the table round which those she had already borne were

starving because there was not enough food for them. When the French

Government, like Colonel Roosevelt, could think of no better cure for

the new tyranny than a revival of the old, Brieux added a play on the

old tyranny to his play on the new tyranny.

This is the explanation of what stupid people call the inconsistencies

of those modern dramatists who, like Ibsen and Brieux, are prophets as

well as playwrights. Ibsen did not write The Wild Duck to ridicule the

lesson he had already taught in Pillars of Society and An Enemy of the

People: he did it to head off his disciples when, in their stampede

from idealism, they forgot the need of ideals and illusions to men not

strong enough to bear the truth. Brieux’s La Foi has virtually the same

theme. It is not an ultramontane tract to defend the Church against

the sceptic. It is a solemn warning that you have not, as so many

modern sceptics assume, disposed of the doctrine when you have proved

that it is false. The miracle of St. Januarius is worked, not by men

who believe in it, but by men who know it to be a trick, but know also

that men cannot be governed by the truth unless they are capable of the

truth, and yet must be governed somehow, truth or no truth. Maternity

and The Three Daughters of Mr. Smith are not contradictory: they are

complementary, like An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck. I myself

have had to introduce into one of my plays a scene in which a young

man defends his vices on the ground that he is one of my disciples. I

did so because the incident had actually occurred in a criminal court,

where a young prisoner gave the same reason and was sentenced to six

months imprisonment, less, I fear, for the offence than for the attempt

to justify it.

The Most Unmentionable of All Subjects.

Finally, Brieux attacked the most unmentionable subject of all: the

subject of the diseases that are supposed to be the punishment of

profligate men and worthless women. Here the taboo acquires double

force. Not only must not the improper thing be mentioned; but the evil

must not be remedied, because it is a just retribution and a wholesome

deterrent. The last point may be dismissed by simply inquiring how

a disease can possibly act as a deterrent when people are kept in

ignorance of its existence. But the punishment theory is a hideous

mistake. It might as well be contended that fires should not be put

out because they are the just punishment of the incendiary. Most of

the victims of these diseases are entirely innocent persons: children

who do not know what vice means, and women to whom it is impossible

to explain what is the matter with them. Nor are their fathers and

husbands necessarily to blame. Even if they were, it would be wicked

to leave them unwarned when the consequences can spread so widely

beyond themselves; for there are dozens of indirect ways in which

this contagion can take place exactly as any other contagion can. The

presence of one infected person in a house may lead to the infection of

everybody else in it even if they have never seen one another. In fact

it is impossible to prove in any given case that the sufferer is in any

way culpable: every profligate excuses himself or herself to the doctor

on this ground; and though the excuse may not be believed, its truth

is generally possible. Add to the chances of contagion the hereditary

transmission of the disease, and the fact that an innocent person

receiving it from a guilty partner without other grounds for divorce

has no legal redress; and it becomes at once apparent that every guilty

case may produce several innocent ones. Under such circumstances, even

if it were possible in a civilized community to leave misconduct to

be checked by its natural or accidental consequences or by private

vengeance instead of by carefully considered legal measures, such an

anarchical solution must be ruled out in the present case, as the

disease strikes blindly at everyone whom it reaches, and there are as

many innocent paths for its venom as guilty ones. The taboo actually

discriminates heavily against the innocent, because, as taboos are

not respected in profligate society, systematic profligates learn the

danger in their loose conversations, and take precautions, whereas the

innocent expose themselves recklessly in complete ignorance, handling

possibly contaminated articles and entering possibly infected places

without the least suspicion that any such danger exists. In Brieux’s

play the husband alone is culpable; but his misconduct presently

involves his wife, his child, and his child’s nurse. It requires

very little imagination to see that this by no means exhausts the

possibilities. The nurse, wholly guiltless of the original sin, is

likely to spread its consequences far more widely than the original

sinner. A grotesque result of this is that there is always a demand,

especially in France, for infected nurses, because the doctor, when he

knows the child to be infected, feels that he is committing a crime

in not warning the nurse; and the only way out of the difficulty is

to find a nurse who is already infected and has nothing more to fear.

How little the conscience of the family is to be depended on when the

interests of a beloved child are in the scale against a mere cold duty

to a domestic servant, has been well shewn by Brieux in the second Act

of his play. But indeed anyone who will take the trouble to read the

treatise of Fournier, or the lectures of Duclaux, or, in English, the

chapters in which Havelock Ellis has dealt with this subject, will need

no further instruction to convince him that no play ever written was

more needed than Les Avariés.

It must be added that a startling change in the urgency of the question

has been produced by recent advances in pathology. Briefly stated, the

facts of the change are as follows. In the boyhood of those of us who

are now of middle age, the diseases in question were known as mainly

of two kinds. One, admittedly very common, was considered transient,

easily curable, harmless to future generations, and, to everyone but

the sufferer, dismissible as a ludicrous incident. The other was known

to be one of the most formidable scourges of mankind, capable at its

worst of hideous disfigurement and ruinous hereditary transmission, but

not at all so common as the more trifling ailment, and alleged by some

authorities to be dying out like typhus or plague. That is the belief

still entertained by the elderly section of the medical profession and

those whom it has instructed.

This easy-going estimate of the situation was alarmingly upset in 1879

by Neisser’s investigation of the supposedly trivial disease, which

he associated with a malignant micro-organism called the gonococcus.

The physicians who still ridicule its gravity are now confronted by

an agitation, led by medical women and professional nurses, who cite

a formidable array of authorities for their statements that it is the

commonest cause of blindness, and that it is transmitted from father to

mother, from mother to child, from child to nurse, producing evils from

which the individual attacked never gets securely free. If half the

scientific evidence be true, a marriage contracted by a person actively

affected in either way is perhaps the worst crime that can be committed

with legal impunity in a civilized community. The danger of becoming

the victim of such a crime is the worst danger that lurks in marriage

for men and women, and in domestic service for nurses.

Stupid people who are forced by these facts to admit that the simple

taboo which forbids the subject to be mentioned at all is ruinous,

still fall back on the plea that though the public ought to be warned,

the theatre is not the proper place for the warning. When asked ‘What,

then, _is_ the proper place?’ they plead that the proper place is out

of hearing of the general public: that is, not in a school, not in a

church, not in a newspaper, not in a public meeting, but in medical

text-books which are read only by medical students. This, of course, is

the taboo over again, only sufficiently ashamed of itself to resort to

subterfuge. The commonsense of the matter is that a public danger needs

a public warning; and the more public the place the more effective the

warning.

Why the Unmentionable Must be Mentioned on the Stage.

But beyond this general consideration there is a special need for

the warning in the theatre. The best friends of the theatre cannot

deny, and need not seek to deny, that a considerable proportion of

our theatrical entertainments stimulate the sexual instincts of the

spectators. Indeed this is so commonly the case that a play which

contains no sexual appeal is quite openly and commonly written of,

even by professional critics of high standing, as being ‘undramatic,’

or ‘not a play at all.’ This is the basis of the prejudice against

the theatre shewn by that section of English society in which sex is

regarded as original sin, and the theatre, consequently, as the gate

of hell. The prejudice is thoughtless: sex is a necessary and healthy

instinct; and its nurture and education is one of the most important

uses of all art, and, for the present at all events, the chief use of

the theatre.

Now it may be an open question whether the theatre has proved itself

worthy of being entrusted with so serious a function. I can conceive

a community passing a law forbidding dramatic authors to deal with

sex as a motive at all. Although such a law would consign the great

bulk of existing dramatic literature to the waste paper basket, it

would neither destroy it wholly nor paralyze all future playwrights.

The bowdlerization of Molière and Shakespear on the basis of such

a law would leave a surprising quantity of their work intact. The

novels of Dickens and his contemporaries are before us to prove how

independent the imaginative writer is of the theme so often assumed

to be indispensable in fiction. The works in which it is dragged in

by the ears on this false assumption are far more numerous than the

tales and plays—Manon Lescaut is an example—of which it forms the

entire substance. Just as the European dramatist is able to write plays

without introducing an accouchement, which is regarded as indispensable

in all sympathetic Chinese plays, he can, if he is put to it, dispense

with any theme that law or custom could conceivably forbid, and still

find himself rich in dramatic material. Let us grant therefore that

love might be ruled out by a written law as effectually as cholera is

ruled out by an unwritten one without utterly ruining the theatre.

Still, it is none the less beyond all question by any reasonable and

thoughtful person that if we tolerate any subject on the stage we must

not tolerate it by halves. It may be questioned whether we should

allow war on the stage; but it cannot sanely be questioned that, if

we do, we must allow its horrors to be represented as well as its

glories. Destruction and murder, pestilence and famine, demoralization

and cruelty, robbery and jobbery, must be allowed to contend with

patriotism and military heroism on the boards as they do in actual war:

otherwise the stage might inflame national hatreds and lead to their

gratification with a recklessness that would make a cockpit of Europe.

Again, if unscrupulous authors are to be allowed to make the stage

a parade of champagne bottles, syphons, and tantaluses, scrupulous

ones must be allowed to write such plays as L’Assommoir, which has,

as a matter of simple fact, effectively deterred many young men from

drunkenness. Nobody disputes the reasonableness of this freedom to

present both sides. But when we come to sex, the taboo steps in,

with the result that all the allurements of sex may be exhibited on

the stage heightened by every artifice that the imagination of the

voluptuary can devize, but not one of its dangers and penalties. You

may exhibit seduction on the stage; but you must not even mention

illegitimate conception and criminal abortion. We may, and do, parade

prostitution to the point of intoxicating every young person in the

theatre; yet no young person may hear a word as to the diseases that

follow prostitution and avenge the prostitute to the third and fourth

generation of them that buy her. Our shops and business offices are

full of young men living in lonely lodgings, whose only artistic

recreation is the theatre. In the theatre we practise upon them every

art that can make their loneliness intolerable and heighten the

charm of the bait in the snares of the street as they go home. But

when a dramatist is enlightened enough to understand the danger, and

sympathetic enough to come to the rescue with a play to expose the

snare and warn the victim, we forbid the manager to perform it on pain

of ruin, and denounce the author as a corrupter of morals. One hardly

knows whether to laugh or cry at such perverse stupidity.

Brieux and Voltaire.

It is a noteworthy fact that when Brieux wrote Les Avariés (Damaged

Goods) his experience with it recalled in one particular that of

Voltaire.

It will be remembered that Voltaire, whose religious opinions were

almost exactly those of most English Nonconformists today, took

refuge from the Established Church of France near Geneva, the city of

Calvin, where he established himself as the first and the greatest of

modern Nonconformist philanthropists. The Genevese ministers found his

theology so much to their taste that they were prevented from becoming

open Voltaireans only by the scandal he gave by his ridicule of the

current Genevese idolatry of the Bible, from which he was as free as

any of our prominent Baptists and Congregationalists. In the same way,

when Brieux, having had his Les Avariés condemned by the now extinct

French censorship, paid a visit to Switzerland, he was invited by a

Swiss minister to read the play from the pulpit; and though the reading

actually took place in a secular building, it was at the invitation

and under the auspices of the minister. The minister knew what the

censor did not know: that what Brieux says in Les Avariés needs saying.

The minister believed that when a thing needs saying, a man is in due

course inspired to say it, and that such inspiration gives him a divine

right to be heard. And this appears to be the simple truth of the

matter in terms of the minister’s divinity. For most certainly Brieux

had every worldly inducement to refrain from writing this play, and no

motive for disregarding these inducements except the motive that made

Luther tear up the Pope’s Bull, and Mahomet tell the idolatrous Arabs

of Mecca that they were worshipping stones.

The reader will now understand why these three great plays have forced

themselves upon us in England as they forced themselves upon Brieux’s

own countrymen. Just as Brieux had to write them, cost what it might,

so we have had to translate them and perform them and finally publish

them for those to read who are out of reach of the theatre. The evils

they deal with are as rampant in England and America as they are in

France. The gonococcus is not an exclusively French microbe: the

possibility of sterilizing marriage is not bounded by the Channel,

the Rhine, or the Alps. The furious revolt of poor women against

bringing into the world more mouths to eat the bread that is already

insufficient for their firstborn, rages with us exactly as it does in

the final scene of Maternity. Therefore these three plays are given to

the English speaking peoples first. There are others to follow of like

importance to us. And there are some, like La Française, which we may

read more lightheartedly when we have learnt the lesson of the rest.

In La Française an American (who might just as well be an Englishman)

has acquired his ideas of France and French life, not from the plays of

Brieux, but from the conventional plays and romances which have only

one theme: adultery. Visiting France, he is received as a friend in

an ordinary respectable French household, where he conceives himself

obliged, as a gallant man of the world, to invite his hostess to commit

with him the adultery which he imagines to be a matter of course in

every French _ménage_. The ignominious failure of his enterprise

makes it much better comedy than his success would have made it in an

ordinary fashionable play.

As Good Fish in the Sea.

The total number of plays produced by Brieux up to the date on which

I write these lines is fifteen. The earliest dates as far back as

1890. It is therefore high time for us to begin to read him, as we

have already begun to act him. The most pitiful sort of ignorance is

ignorance of the few great men who are men of our own time. Most of

us die without having heard of those contemporaries of ours for our

opportunities of seeing and applauding whom posterity will envy us.

Imagine meeting the ghost of an Elizabethan cockney in heaven, and, on

asking him eagerly what Shakespear was like, being told either that

the cockney had never heard of Shakespear, or knew of him vaguely as

an objectionable writer of plays full of regrettable errors of taste.

To save our own ghosts from disgracing themselves in this manner when

they are asked about Brieux, is one of the secondary uses of this first

instalment of his works in English.

G. B. S.

PARKNASILLA AND AYOT ST. LAWRENCE.

1909.

Maternity

[Maternité]

Translated by Mrs. Bernard Shaw

Cast of the original production before the Stage Society at the King’s

Hall, London, on April 8, 9 and 10, 1906.

Lucie Brignac SUZANNE SHELDON

Julien Brignac DENNIS EADIE

Lioret ROBERT GREY

Annette MURIEL ASHWYNNE

Catherine BETTY CASTLE

Mme. Bernin LILIAN M. REVELL

Pierre Poiret FRED GROVE

Laurent CHARLES DODSWORTH

Le Sous-Intendant MICHAEL SHERBROOKE

Le Colonel FRANK H. DENTON

M. Chevillot VINCENT STERNROYD

Jacques Poiret TREVOR LOWE

Mme. Chevillot Mrs. CHARLES MALTBY

Le Président KENYON MUSGRAVE

L’Avocat C. HERBERT HEWETSON

Mme. Thomas CLARE GREET

Marie Gaubert ITALIA CONTI

Tupin BLAKE ADAMS

Mme. Tupin EILY MALYON

Le Procureur CHARLES A. DORAN

ACT I

_Brignac’s drawing-room. Doors right, left, and at the back.

Furniture of a government official. When the curtain rises Lucie,

a woman of about thirty, is alone. Brignac, a man of thirty-eight,

opens a door outside and calls gaily from the anteroom._

BRIGNAC. Here I am. [_He takes off his cloak, gives it to a

maid-servant, and enters_].

LUCIE [_gaily_] Good morning, sous-préfet.

BRIGNAC [_he is in the uniform of a sous-préfet. A tunic or dolman,

with simple embroidery and two rows of buttons; a cap with an

embroidered band, a sword with a mother o’ pearl handle and a

silver-plated sheath. His belt is of silk; his trousers blue with a

silver stripe; and he wears a black cravat. He comes forward, taking

off his sword and belt during the following conversation. He is

finishing a large cigar_] Have you been bored all alone?

LUCIE. With three children one hasn’t time to be bored.

BRIGNAC [_taking his sword into the anteroom_] By Jove, no!

LUCIE. Well, how did the luncheon go off?

BRIGNAC [_throwing away his cigar-end_] Very well. I’ll tell you all

about it in a minute. [_Going to the door to the right and calling

through_] Has M. Mouton come?

A VOICE [_from outside_] Yes, monsieur le sous-préfet. Shall I tell him

he’s wanted?

BRIGNAC. No. Bring me my letters. [_He closes the door and comes back_]

Shall I never catch that fellow out?

LUCIE. Why do you want to?

BRIGNAC. I want to get rid of him, of course, and get a young chap. An

unmarried man wouldn’t ask half the salary I give this one.

_A clerk enters bringing letters._

CLERK. The letters, monsieur le sous-préfet.

BRIGNAC. All right.

_The clerk goes out. Brignac glances at the addresses and sorts the

letters into several piles without opening the envelopes._

LUCIE. That little ceremony always amuses me.

BRIGNAC. What ceremony? Sorting my letters?

LUCIE. Without opening them.

BRIGNAC. I know what’s inside by looking at them.

LUCIE. Nonsense!

BRIGNAC. Don’t you believe it? Well, look. Here’s one from the mayor of

St. Sauveur. Something he asks me to forward to the préfet. [_He opens

it and hands the letter to his wife, who does not take it_] There!

LUCIE. Why doesn’t he send it direct to the préfet?

BRIGNAC. What would be the use of _us_ then?

LUCIE [_laughing_] That’s true.

BRIGNAC. Now I suppose you’ll make some more jokes about sous-préfets

and their work. It’s easy, and not particularly clever. Perhaps some

of us don’t take our jobs very seriously, but I’m not like that. If we

_are_ useless, our business is to make ourselves indispensable. Just

take to-day for example and see if I’m not busy enough. This morning

I signed thirty documents; afterwards I went to the meeting of the

Council of Revision.[A] Then came this luncheon of the mayor’s to all

these gentlemen. Now I shall have an hour of office-work, and then I

shall have to go and meet our guests and bring them here, to our own

dinner. [_Pause_] Oh! and I forgot—after dinner there will be that

reception at the Club that they put off to suit me. That’s a fairly

full official day, isn’t it?

[Footnote A: The Board appointed to inspect conscripts, and see if they

are fit for military service.—_Note by the Translator._]

LUCIE. Yes.

BRIGNAC. We shall only have part of the Committee at dinner. Some of

the members have refused. [_With interest_] Hullo! I didn’t see this. A

letter from the Minister of the Interior.

LUCIE. Perhaps it’s your promotion.

BRIGNAC [_opening the letter_] One never knows—No, it’s a circular

[_pause_] upon the decline of the population. [_He runs his eye through

the paper_] Most important. [_He goes to the door on the right_] M.

Lioret!

_A clerk comes in._

CLERK. Yes, monsieur le sous-préfet?

BRIGNAC [_giving him papers_] Give that to M. Mouton. It must be done

by five o’clock, and _well_ done. This for M. Lamblin—M. Rouge—And put

this upon my desk. I will see to it myself and give it the attention it

requires.

_The clerk goes out._

LUCIE. Perhaps it’s not worth attention.

BRIGNAC. It needs an acknowledgment anyway; and the terms used in the

original must be most carefully reproduced in the acknowledgment.

LUCIE. Now tell me how the luncheon went off.

BRIGNAC. I _have_ told you. It went off very well. Too well. The mayor

wanted to be even with us. All the same, our dinner to-night will be

better. [_He takes a cigar out of his pocket_] I brought away a cigar

to show it to you. Are ours as big?

LUCIE. Pretty much the same.

BRIGNAC. He doesn’t give you cigars like that at his big receptions.

There’s the menu.

LUCIE [_glancing at it_] Oh! I say!

BRIGNAC. The champagne was decanted!

LUCIE. Well, we’ll have ours decanted. [_Brightly_] Only, you know,

it’ll cost money. We shouldn’t have much left if we had to give many

dinners to Councils of Revision.

BRIGNAC. Don’t worry about that. You know very well that when Balureau

gets back into power he’ll have us out of this dead-alive Châteauneuf,

and give us a step up.

LUCIE. Yes; but _will_ he get back into power?

BRIGNAC. Why shouldn’t he?

LUCIE. He was in such a short time.

BRIGNAC. Precisely. They hadn’t time to find him out.

LUCIE [_laughing_] If he heard you!

BRIGNAC. You misunderstand me. I have the greatest respect for—

LUCIE [_interrupting_] I know, I know. I was only joking.

BRIGNAC. You’re always worrying about the future; now what makes me the

man I am is my persistent confidence in the future. If Balureau doesn’t

get into office again we’ll stay quietly at Châteauneuf, that’s all.

_You_ can’t complain, as you were born here.

LUCIE. But it’s _you_ who complain.

BRIGNAC. I complain of the want of spirit in the people. I complain

that I cannot get them to love and respect our political institutions.

I complain above all of the society of Châteauneuf: a set of officials

entertaining one another.

LUCIE. Society in Châteauneuf doesn’t open its arms to us, certainly.

BRIGNAC. It doesn’t think us important enough.

LUCIE. To have a larger acquaintance we ought to entertain the

commercial people. You won’t do that.

BRIGNAC. I have to consider the dignity of my position.

LUCIE. As you often say, we are in the enemy’s camp.

BRIGNAC. That’s true. But the fact that people hate me shows that I am

a person of some importance. We must look out for the unexpected. How

do you know some great opportunity won’t come in my way to-morrow, or

next month, or in six months? An opportunity to distinguish myself and

force the people in Paris to pay attention to me.

LUCIE. Yes; you’ve been waiting for that opportunity for eleven years.

BRIGNAC. Obviously then it is so much the nearer.

LUCIE. And what will it be?

BRIGNAC. Some conflict, some incident—trouble.

LUCIE. Trouble at Châteauneuf?

BRIGNAC. I’m quite aware that Châteauneuf is most confoundedly

peaceable. One gets no chance. I count more upon Balureau than on

anything else. [_Pause_] Is Annette with her friend Gabrielle?

LUCIE. No.

BRIGNAC. But this is Tuesday.

LUCIE. It’s not time for her to go yet.

BRIGNAC. Yes, but if she puts it off till too late.

LUCIE. I’ve wanted for some time to speak to you about Annette. Don’t

you think she goes to the Bernins a little too often?

BRIGNAC. Not at all. They’re very influential people and may be useful

to me. Call her. [_He goes to the door to the left and calls himself_]

Annette! [_Coming back_] Annette goes three times a week to practise

with Mademoiselle Bernin, who goes everywhere. That’s an excellent

thing for us, and may be of consequence. [_Annette comes in_] Annette,

don’t forget how late it is. It’s time you were with your friend.

ANNETTE [_going out_] Yes, yes. I’ll go and put on my hat.

LUCIE [_to Brignac_] They want Annette to spend a few days with them in

the country. Ought we to let her?

BRIGNAC. Why not? She wants to go. You know how fond she is of

Gabrielle.

LUCIE. Yes; but Gabrielle has a brother.

BRIGNAC. Young Jacques. But he’s going to be married, my dear.

LUCIE. Is he?

BRIGNAC. Yes, yes, of course. [_Annette comes in from the left_] Make

haste, Annette.

LUCIE. What does it matter if she’s five minutes late?

ANNETTE. No—no—Where _is_ my music?

LUCIE. You look quite upset. Would you rather not go?

ANNETTE. Yes, yes, I’ll go—Good-bye. [_She hurries off, forgetting her

music_].

LUCIE [_calling_] Your music! [_she holds out the music-case_].

ANNETTE. Oh, thank you. Good-bye. [_She goes out_].

LUCIE. Don’t you think Annette has been a little depressed lately?

BRIGNAC. Eh? Yes—no—has she? Have you found a new parlor-maid?

LUCIE. Yes.

BRIGNAC. There, you see! You were worrying about that.

LUCIE. I had good reason to worry. I’ve been without a parlor-maid for

a week. I liked a girl who came yesterday very much; but she wouldn’t

take the place.

BRIGNAC. Why not?

LUCIE. She said there were too many children here.

BRIGNAC. Too many children! Three!

LUCIE. Yes: but the eldest is three years old and the youngest two

months.

BRIGNAC. There’s a nurse.

LUCIE. I told her that, of course.

BRIGNAC. Well, I declare! And when you consider that it meant coming to

the sous-préfet!

LUCIE. I suppose she’s not impressed by titles.

BRIGNAC. And what about the one you have engaged?

LUCIE. She’s elderly. Perhaps she’ll be steady.

BRIGNAC. Yes, and have other vices. Still—

LUCIE. The unhappy woman has two children out at nurse, and two older

ones at Bordeaux. Her husband deserted her.

BRIGNAC. Too bad of Céline to force us to turn her out of doors.

LUCIE. Her conduct was bad, certainly. All the same—

BRIGNAC. Oh, it was not her _conduct_! She might have conducted herself

ten times worse if only she had had the sense to keep up appearances.

Outside her duty to me her life was her own. But we have to draw the

line at a confinement in the house. You admit that, don’t you? [_A

pause. Lucie does not answer_] It was getting quite unmistakable—you

know it was. Those wretched grocer’s boys are a perfect scourge to

decent houses. [_He takes up a paper_] This circular is admirable.

LUCIE. Is it?

BRIGNAC. And of the greatest importance. Such style, too. Listen. [_He

reads_] ‘Our race is diminishing! Such a state of affairs demands the

instant attention of the authorities. The Legislature must strenuously

endeavour to devise remedial measures against the disastrous phenomenon

now making itself manifest in our midst.’ The Minister of the Interior

has done this very well. The end is really fine—quite touching.

Listen. ‘Truth will triumph: reason will prevail: the noble sentiment

of nationality and the divine spirit of self-sacrifice will bear us

on to victory. We who know the splendid recuperative power of our

valiant French race look forward with confidence and security to the

magnificent moral regeneration of this great and ancient people.’ [_He

looks at his wife_].

LUCIE. It’s well written, certainly.

BRIGNAC [_continuing to read_] ‘Let each one, in his own sphere of

action and influence, work with word and pen to point out the peril and

urge the immediate necessity of a remedy. Committees must be formed

all over France to evolve schemes and promote measures by which the

birth-rate may be raised.’

LUCIE. Does it suggest any scheme?

BRIGNAC. Yes. The rest of the circular is full of the ways and means. I

shall read it aloud this evening.

LUCIE. This evening!

BRIGNAC. Yes. [_He goes to the right hand door and calls_] Monsieur

Lioret!

CLERK [_coming in_] Monsieur le sous-préfet.

BRIGNAC. Make me two copies of this circular _yourself_; you will

understand its great importance. And bring the original back _yourself_

and place it upon this table.

CLERK. Yes, monsieur le sous-préfet. [_He goes out_].

BRIGNAC [_returning to Lucie_] The covering letter from my official

superior ends with these words: ‘Have the goodness, M. le sous-préfet,

to send me at once a statistical schedule of all committees or

associations of this nature at present existing in your district,

and let me know what measures you think of taking in response to the

desiderata of the Government.’ Well, I shall take advantage of the

dinner we give to-night to the members of the Council of Revision to

set on foot some associations of the sort, and then I can write up to

the authorities, ’There were no associations: _I_ created them’!

LUCIE. But is the dinner a suitable—

BRIGNAC. Listen to me. This morning there was a Council of Revision at

Châteauneuf.

LUCIE. Yes.

BRIGNAC. The mayor invited the members to luncheon and we have invited

them to dinner.

LUCIE. Well?

BRIGNAC. The Council of Revision is composed of a Councillor to the

Prefecture, a general Councillor, a district Councillor—I leave out

the doctor—and the mayors of the communes concerned—_the mayors of

the communes concerned_. I shall profit by the chance of having

them all together after dinner to-night—after a dinner where the

champagne will be decanted, mind you—to impress them with my own

enthusiasm and conviction. _They_ shall create local committees, and

_I_ shall presently announce the formation of those committees to the

authorities. So even if Balureau doesn’t get into power, I shall sooner

or later force the Minister to say, ’But why don’t we give a man like

Brignac a really active post?’ This is a first-rate opening for us: I

saw it at a glance. After dinner I shall shew them my diagram. You must

make my office into a cloak-room, and—

LUCIE [_interrupting_] Why? There’s room in the hall.

BRIGNAC. I can’t put the diagram in the hall, and I want an excuse for

bringing them all through the office. Some day the Colonel may meet the

Minister of the Interior and say to him: ‘I saw in the sous-préfecture

at Châteauneuf’—

LUCIE [_interrupting again_] All right. As you like.

BRIGNAC. You trust to me. You don’t understand anything about it. You

didn’t even know how a Council of Revision was made up,—you, the wife

of a sous-préfet. And yet every year we give them a dinner. And we’ve

been married four years.

LUCIE [_gently and pleasantly_] Now think for a minute. We’ve been

married four years, that’s true. But this time three years was just

after Edmée was born: two years ago I was expecting little Louise;

and last year after weaning her I was ill. Remember too that if I had

nursed the last one myself I could not be at dinner tonight, as she is

only two months old.

BRIGNAC. You complain of that?

LUCIE [_laughing_] No: but I am glad to be having a holiday.

BRIGNAC [_gaily_] You know what I said: as long as we haven’t a boy—

LUCIE [_brightly_] We ought to have a trip to Switzerland first.

BRIGNAC. No, no, no. We have only girls: I want a boy.

LUCIE [_laughing_] Is it the Minister’s circular that—

BRIGNAC. No, it is _not_ the Minister’s circular.

LUCIE. Then let me have time to breathe.

BRIGNAC. You can breathe afterwards.

LUCIE. Before.

BRIGNAC. After.

LUCIE. Wouldn’t you rather have a holiday?

BRIGNAC. No.

LUCIE [_gently_] Listen, Julien, since we’re talking about this. I

wanted to tell you—I haven’t had much leisure since our marriage. We’ve

not been able to take advantage of a single one of your holidays. And

if you don’t agree to let—[_tenderly_] Maurice—wait another year it

will be the same thing this time. [_Smiling_] I really have a right to

a little rest. Consider. We’ve not had any time to know one another,

or to love one another. Besides, remember that we already have to find

dowries for three girls.

BRIGNAC. I tell you this is going to be a boy.

LUCIE. A boy is expensive.

BRIGNAC. We are going to be rich.

LUCIE. How?

BRIGNAC. Luck may come in several ways. I may stay in the Civil Service

and get promoted quickly. I may go back to the Bar: I was a fairly

successful barrister once. I may have some unexpected stroke of luck.

Anyway, I’m certain we shall be rich. [_Smiling_] After all, it’s not

much good you’re saying no, if I say yes.

LUCIE [_hurt_] Evidently. My consent was asked for before I was given a

husband, but my consent is not asked for before I am given a child.

BRIGNAC. Are you going to make a scene?

LUCIE. No. But all the same—this slavery—

BRIGNAC. What?

LUCIE. Yes, _slavery_. After all you are disposing of my health,

my sufferings, my life—of a year of my existence, calmly, without

consulting me.

BRIGNAC. Do I do it out of selfishness? Do you suppose I am not a most

unhappy husband all the time I have a future mother at my side instead

of a loving wife? ’A father is a man all the same.’

LUCIE [_ironically_] Oh, you are _most_ unhappy, aren’t you?

BRIGNAC. Yes.

LUCIE. Rubbish!

BRIGNAC. Rubbish?

LUCIE. You evidently take me for a fool.

BRIGNAC. I don’t understand.

LUCIE. I know what you do at those times. _Now_ do you understand?

BRIGNAC. No.

LUCIE [_irritated_] Don’t deny it. You must see that I know all about

it. The best thing you can do is to be silent, as I have pretended so

far to know nothing.

BRIGNAC [_coming off his high-horse_] I assure you—

LUCIE. Do you want me to tell you the name of the person you go to see

over at Villeneuve, while I am nursing, or a ‘future mother’ as you

call it?

BRIGNAC. If you’re going to believe all the gossip you hear—

LUCIE. We had better say no more about it.

BRIGNAC. I beg to observe that it was not I who started the subject.

There, there—you’re in a bad temper. I shall go and do some work, and

then I must join those gentlemen. Only, you know, you’re mistaken.

LUCIE. Oh, yes, of course.

_He goes out to the right, shrugging his shoulders. Lucie rings.

Catherine comes in._

LUCIE. Are Nurse and Josephine out with the children?

CATHERINE. Yes, madame.

LUCIE [_beaming_] Were my little ones well and happy?

CATHERINE. Oh, yes, madame.

LUCIE [_sincerely_] Aren’t my little girls pretty?

CATHERINE. Yes: pretty and clever.

LUCIE. The other day Edmée was talking about playing horses, and Louise

said ‘’orses’ quite distinctly. It’s wonderful at her age.

CATHERINE. I’ve seen lots of children, but I never saw such nice ones

before.

LUCIE. I’m so glad. You’re a good creature, Catherine.

_Annette comes in. She pulls off her hat, wild with joy._

ANNETTE. Lucie! Sister! News! Great news! Good news!

LUCIE. What is it?

ANNETTE [_giving her hat to Catherine_] Take this, Catherine, and go.

[_She pushes her out gently_].

LUCIE [_laughing_] Well!

ANNETTE. I must kiss you, _kiss_ you! I wanted to kiss the people in

the street. [_She bursts into a laugh which ends in a sob_].

LUCIE. Little sister Annette, you’ve gone quite mad.

ANNETTE. No—not mad—I’m so happy.

LUCIE. What is it, little girl?

ANNETTE [_in tears_] I’m happy! I’m happy!

LUCIE. Why, what’s the matter with the child?

ANNETTE. No, no. It’s all right—don’t speak to me. I shall soon be

better. It’s nervous. [_She laughs and cries at the same time_]. I tell

you I’m happy—only—only—How stupid it is to cry like this. I can’t help

it. [_She puts her arms round Lucie’s neck_]. Oh, little mother, I love

you—I _do_ love you. [_She kisses Lucie: another little sob_]. Oh, I

_am_ silly. There now, it’s all right—I’ve done. [_She wipes her eyes_]

There: now I’m going to tell you. [_With great joy and emotion, and

very simply_] I am going to be married. Monsieur and Madame Bernin are

coming to see you about it.

LUCIE. Why?

ANNETTE. Because Jacques has told them to.

LUCIE. Jacques!

ANNETTE [_very fast, tumbling out the words_] Yes, it was when I

was practising with Gabrielle. He had guessed—it happened this

way—practising—he sings a little—oh, nothing very grand—once—[_she

laughs_] but I’ll tell you about that afterwards—it’s because of

that—We shall be married soon. [_Fresh tears. Then she says gravely,

embracing Lucy_] I _do_ love him so, and if he hadn’t asked me to marry

him—You don’t understand?

LUCIE [_laughing_] I guess a little.

ANNETTE. Do you want me to tell you all about it, from the beginning?

LUCIE. Yes.

ANNETTE. I want to so much. If it won’t bore you. It would make me so

happy.

LUCIE. Go on.

ANNETTE. Well, when I was playing duets with Gabrielle—I must tell you

that I began by detesting him because he will make fun of everybody.

But he’s most kind, _really_. For instance—

LUCIE. Now keep to the point. When you played duets—

ANNETTE. Yes, I was telling you. When I played duets with Gabrielle

he used to come and listen to us. He stood behind us to turn over the

leaves: once he put his hand upon my shoulder—

LUCIE. You let him?

ANNETTE. He had his other hand on Gabrielle’s shoulder—it would have

been priggish to say anything.

LUCIE. Yes, but with Gabrielle it’s different.

ANNETTE. That’s what I was going to say. My heart began beating so—I

got so red, and I had no idea what I was playing. And then, another

time—he couldn’t see the music—he stooped right down. But that’s all

nothing. We love each other, that’s the whole thing.

LUCIE. And has he told you that he loves you?

ANNETTE [_gravely_] Yes.

LUCIE. And you hid all that from me? I’m sorry, Annette.

ANNETTE. I’m so, _so_ sorry. But it all came so gradually. I can hardly

tell now exactly when it began. I even thought I was mistaken. And

then—then—when we first dared to speak to one another about what we had

never spoken of, though we both knew it so well—I knew I’d done wrong.

But I was so ashamed I _couldn’t_ tell you about it then.

LUCIE [_tenderly_] All the same it was very naughty of you, darling.

ANNETTE. Oh, don’t scold me! Please, please don’t scold me. If you only

knew how I’ve repented—how unhappy I’ve been. Haven’t you noticed?

LUCIE. Yes. Then he’s spoken to his father and mother?

ANNETTE. Some time ago.

LUCIE. And they consent?

ANNETTE. They are coming this afternoon.

LUCIE. Why didn’t they come sooner?

ANNETTE. Well—Jacques begged them to, but they didn’t want it at first.

They wanted Gabrielle to be married first. It was even arranged that I

should pretend I didn’t know they had been told. Then, to-day, I met

Jacques in the street—

LUCIE. In the street?

ANNETTE. Yes. Lately he has not been coming to our practices—so I meet

him—

LUCIE. In the street!

ANNETTE. Generally we only bow to one another, and that’s all. But

to-day he said to me as he passed, ‘My mother is going to your house.

She’s there behind me.’ Then I hurried in to tell you. [_With a happy

smile_] He was quite pale. Please don’t scold me, I am so happy.

Forgive me.

LUCIE [_kissing her_] Yes: I forgive you. Then you’re going away from

me, you bad thing.

ANNETTE. Yes, I am _bad_. Bad and ungrateful. That’s true.

LUCIE. Marriage is a serious thing. Are you sure you will suit one

another?

ANNETTE. Oh, I’m certain of it. We’ve quarrelled already.

LUCIE. What about?

ANNETTE. About a book he lent me.

LUCIE. What book?

ANNETTE. Anna Karenina. He liked Vronsky better than Peter Levin.

He talked nonsense. He said he didn’t believe in Madame Karenina’s

suicide. You remember, she throws herself under the wheels of the train

Vronsky is going away in. Don’t you remember? It doesn’t matter.

LUCIE. And then?

ANNETTE. And then—there’s a ring—perhaps that’s the Bernins.

_A silence. Catherine appears with a card._

LUCIE. Yes. It’s Madame Bernin.

ANNETTE. Oh! [_Going to her room_] You’ll come and fetch me presently.

LUCIE. Yes. [_To Catherine_] Show the lady in.

ANNETTE. Don’t be long.

_She goes out. Lucie tidies herself before a glass. Madame Bernin

comes in._

MME. B. How do you do, Madame Brignac?

LUCIE. How do you do, madame?

MME. B. Are you quite well?

LUCIE. Very well, madame. And you?

MME. B. I need not ask after M. Brignac.

LUCIE. And M. Bernin?

MME. B. He’s very well, thank you.

LUCIE. Won’t you sit down?

MME. B. Thank you. [_Sits_] What lovely weather.

LUCIE. Yes, isn’t it? How lucky you are to be able to get into the

country. Annette is so looking forward to her visit to you.

MME. B. Well, I came to-day—first of all to have the pleasure of seeing

you—and then to have a chat with you about that very matter.

LUCIE. And about another matter, too, I think.

MME. B. Another matter?

LUCIE. Not about another?

MME. B. No, I don’t quite understand—

LUCIE. Oh, then I beg your pardon. Tell me what it is about Annette’s

visit.

MME. B. My daughter has just got an invitation to spend some time with

her cousins the Guibals, and we can’t possibly refuse to let Gabrielle

go to them. So I’ve come to beg you to excuse us, because—as Gabrielle

won’t be there—

LUCIE. Oh, of course, madame. Will Mademoiselle Gabrielle make a long

stay with her cousins?

MME. B. Well, that’s just what’s so annoying. We don’t know exactly: it

might be a week, or it might be a month. And she _may_ stay there all

the time we are away from Châteauneuf.

LUCIE. Poor little Annette!

MME. B. But I thought you were going away somewhere yourselves this

Easter?

LUCIE. Yes.

MME. B [_kindly_] That relieves my mind a little, and I hope it will

make up to Mademoiselle Annette for the disappointment I am obliged to

cause her—to my very great regret.

LUCIE [_after a silence_] Will you excuse me, madame. [_Hesitating_]

Perhaps this is indiscreet.

MME. B. Oh, I am sure not, Madame Brignac.

LUCIE. I only wanted to ask you if it is long since Mademoiselle

Gabrielle got this invitation from her cousins?

MME. B. About a week.

LUCIE. A week!

MME. B. Why does that surprise you?

LUCIE. Because she did not mention it to Annette.

MME. B. She was afraid of disappointing her.

LUCIE. Only yesterday Annette was telling me about all sorts of

excursions your daughter was planning for them both. Madame, this

invitation is an excuse: please tell me the whole truth. Annette is

only my sister, but I love her as if she was my own child, and I speak

as a mother to a mother. I’m not going to try to be clever or to stand

on my dignity. This is how it is: Annette believes your son loves her,

and when you were announced just now she thought you came to arrange

her marriage with him. Now you know all that I know. Tell me the truth,

and let us do what we can to prevent unhappiness.

MME. B. As you speak so simply and feelingly I will tell you candidly

exactly what is in my mind. As a matter of fact this invitation to

Gabrielle is only a device of ours to prevent Jacques and Annette

seeing any more of one another.

LUCIE. Then you don’t want them to see any more of one another?

MME. B. No, because I don’t want them to marry.

LUCIE. Because Annette is poor?

MME. B [_after some hesitation_] Well—since we’re speaking

plainly—yes, because she is poor. Ah, dear Madame Brignac, we have both

been very much to blame for not foreseeing what has happened.

LUCIE. _We_ have been to blame?

MME. B. I know Annette, and I like her very much. I know you too,

better than you think, and I have the greatest respect and esteem for

you; it has never even occurred to me that in seeking our acquaintance

you had any other motive than friendship. But you ought to have feared

and foreseen what has happened?

LUCIE. What should I fear? Annette went to see Gabrielle. How could

I know that you let your son be with them? You knew it because it

happened at your house, and it is you who have been wanting in prudence

and foresight. You invited this poor child, you exposed her to danger,

you let her take a fancy to your son, you allowed them to fall in love

with one another, and you come to-day and calmly tell me that this

marriage is impossible, and you are going off to the country leaving it

to me to break the poor child’s heart.

MME. B. How do you know I foresaw nothing? And how can one tell the

right moment to interfere to prevent playmates becoming lovers? While

I was uncertain didn’t I run the risk of causing the very thing I was

anxious to prevent, by separating them without a good reason? When I

really felt sure there was danger I spoke to Jacques. I said to him

‘Annette is not a suitable match for you: you must be very careful how

you behave to her: don’t forget to treat this girl as a sister.’

LUCIE. And he said ‘It is too late: we love each other.’

MME. B. On the contrary, he said: ‘You needn’t worry, mother. I have

been thinking the same thing myself, and I am a man of honor. Besides,

though Annette is charming, she’s not the sort of woman I mean to

marry.’

LUCIE. How long ago did he tell you that?

MME. B. About two months ago.

LUCIE. Well, at that time he had already spoken of marriage to Annette;

or at least he had spoken of love, which from him to her is the same

thing.

MME. B. I can only tell you what I know.

LUCIE. Well, madame, all this is beside the question. You are opposed

to this marriage?

MME. B. Yes.

LUCIE. Finally? Irrevocably?

MME. B. Finally. Irrevocably.

LUCIE. Because Annette has no money?

MME. B. Yes.

LUCIE. Your son knew she had no money when he made her love him.

MME. B. Believe me, he didn’t mean to do the harm he has done. A young

girl of his own age was his sister’s constant companion, and at first

he treated her as he treated his sister. At first, I’m sure, it was

without any special intention that he saw so much of her. Afterwards

probably he made some pretty speeches to your little Annette, and

no doubt he was greatly taken with her. As Annette is more innocent

and simple and affectionate, and of course more ignorant than he is,

she has been more quickly and more deeply touched. But my son is not

the worthless fellow you think him, and the proof of that is that he

himself came and told me all about it.

LUCIE. And when you told him he must give up Annette, he agreed?

MME. B. Yes, he agreed. He’s reasonable and sensible, and he saw the

force of my arguments. He saw that this parting, though it will be

painful, was an absolute necessity. He will certainly suffer; but they

are both so young. At that age love troubles don’t last.

LUCIE. I understand. In a week your son will have forgotten all about

it. But Annette—

MME. B. She will soon forget it, too.

LUCIE. I don’t know—I don’t know. Oh, my poor darling! If you had seen

her just now when she came to tell me about it! It’s not for joy she

will cry now. Oh!—[_she begins to cry_].

MME. B [_moved_] Don’t cry—oh, don’t cry. I assure you I am most

deeply sorry. Oh, if it were only possible, how happy it would make

me that my boy should marry Annette. The girl he is engaged to is an

affected little thing who annoys me, and I really love your sister.

LUCIE. But if that is true you can afford to let your son marry a girl

without fortune.

MME. B. No: we’re not so well off as people think. There’s Gabrielle to

be provided for. There will be next to nothing left for Jacques.

LUCIE. But he might work.

MME. B. He has not been brought up to that.

LUCIE. That was a mistake.

MME. B. The professions are overcrowded. Would you have him go into

an office and get 200 francs a month? They wouldn’t be able to keep a

servant.

LUCIE. He could earn more than that.

MME. B. If he got 500—could he keep up his position? Could he remain in

his present set? It would be a come-down for him; a come-down he would

owe to his wife; and sooner or later he would reproach her for it. And

think of their children! They would have just enough to send their son

to a board school, and make their daughter a post office clerk. And

even then they would have to pinch and screw to provide for her until

she got in.

LUCIE. It’s true.

MME. B. You see that I’m right. I can’t say I’m proud of having to

say such things—of belonging to a society that forces one to do such

things. But we’re not in a land of romance. We live among vain,

selfish, hard-headed people.

LUCIE. You despise them, and yet you sacrifice everything to their

opinion.

MME. B. Yes: because everything depends upon their opinion. Social

position depends upon it. One must be a very exceptional person to be

able to defy public opinion. And Jacques is not exceptional.

LUCIE. That’s nothing to be proud of. If he was exceptional, I mean

if he was different to all these people about, he would find his love

would prevent him from troubling about the sneers of worthless idlers.

MME. B. His love! Love goes: poverty stays: it is a proverb. Beauty

passes: want remains.

LUCIE. But you, madame, yourself—you and your husband are a proof that

one can marry poor and make a fortune. Your story is well known. Your

husband began in an office, then he started his own business; and if

riches make happiness, you are happy now—you and he—aren’t you?

MME. B. No, no, _no_; we are not happy, because we have worn ourselves

out hunting after happiness. We wanted to ‘get on,’ and we got on. But

_what_ a price we paid for it! First, when we were both earning wages,

our life was one long drudgery of petty economy and meanness. When

we set up on our own account we lived in an atmosphere of trickery,

of enmity, of lying; flattering the customers, and always in terror

of bankruptcy. Oh, I know the road to fortune! It means tears, lies,

envy, hate; one suffers—and one makes other people suffer. I’ve had

to go through it: my children shan’t. We’ve only had two children:

we meant only to have one. Having two we had to be doubly hard upon

ourselves. Instead of a husband and wife helping one another, we have

been partners spying upon one another; calling one another to account

for every little expenditure or stupidity; and on our very pillows

disputing about our business. That’s how we got rich; and now we can’t

enjoy our money because we don’t know how to use it; and we aren’t

happy because our old age is made bitter by the memories and the rancor

left from the old bad days: because we have suffered too much and hated

too much. My children shall not go through this. I endured it that they

might be spared. Good-bye, madame.

LUCIE. Good-bye.

_Madame Bernin goes out. After a moment Lucie goes slowly to

Annette’s door and opens it._

ANNETTE [_coming in_] You’ve been crying! It’s because I’m going away,

isn’t it? Not because there’s anything in the way of—[_with increasing

trouble_] Tell me, Lucie!

LUCIE. You love him so much then?

ANNETTE. If we were not to be married—I should die.

LUCIE. No, you wouldn’t die. Think of all the girls who have said that:

did they die?

ANNETTE. Is there anything to prevent?

LUCIE. No, no.

ANNETTE. And when is it to be? Did you talk about that?

LUCIE. What a state of excitement you are in! Annette, dear, you must

try to control yourself a little.

ANNETTE [_making an effort_] Yes. You’re right. I’m a little off my

head.

LUCIE. You are really.

ANNETTE [_still controlling herself_] Well, tell me. What did Madame

Bernin say?

LUCIE. What a hurry you are in to leave me! You don’t care for me any

more, then?

ANNETTE [_gravely_] Ah, my dear! If I hadn’t you what would become of

me! [_A silence_] But you’re telling me _nothing_. You don’t seem to be

telling me the truth—you’re hiding something from me—there _is_ some

difficulty, I’m certain of it. If there wasn’t you’d say there wasn’t,

you wouldn’t put me off—you’d tell me what Madame Bernin said.

LUCIE. Well—there is something.

ANNETTE [_bursting into tears_] Oh, my God!

LUCIE. You are both very young. It would be better to wait a little—a

year—perhaps more.

ANNETTE [_crying_] Wait—a year!

LUCIE. Come, come, stop crying. There’s really no reason for all this.

I am not quite pleased with you, Annette. You’re barely nineteen. If

you waited to marry until you are twenty it would be no harm.

ANNETTE. It’s not possible!

LUCIE. Not possible? [_She looks searchingly at her_]. Annette, you

frighten me. If it wasn’t you—[_tenderly and gravely_] Have I been

wrong to trust you?

ANNETTE. No! No! What can you be thinking of—Oh, _indeed_—

LUCIE. What is it, then?

ANNETTE. Well, I’ve been such a fool as to tell some friends I was

engaged.

LUCIE. Before speaking to me about it?

ANNETTE [_confused_] Don’t, _please_, ask me any more questions.

LUCIE. Annette, I must scold you a little. You’ve hurt me very much

by keeping me in the dark about all this. Nothing would have made me

believe that you’d do such a thing. I thought you were too fond of

me not to tell me at once about anybody—any man—you were interested

in. I find I was mistaken. We see one another every day, we are never

parted, and yet you have managed to conceal from me the one thing your

heart was full of. You ought to have told me. Not because I am your

elder sister, but because I take mother’s place towards you. And for

a better reason still—because I am your friend. It’s been a kind of

treason. A little more, and I should have heard that you were engaged

from strangers and not from you. Well, my dear, you’ve been wrong:

these people are not worth crying about. Now be brave and remember your

self-respect: I am going to tell you the whole truth. They don’t want

you, my poor little girl: you are not rich enough for them.

ANNETTE [_staring blindly at her sister_] They don’t want me! They

don’t want me! But Jacques! Jacques! Does _he_ know?

LUCIE. Yes, he knows.

ANNETTE. He means to give me up if they tell him to?

LUCIE. Yes.

ANNETTE [_beside herself_] I must see him. I will write to him. I

_must_ see him. If they don’t want me there is nothing left but to kill

myself.

LUCIE [_obliging Annette to look her in the face_] Annette, look at me.

[_Silence. Then tenderly and gravely_] I think you have something to

tell me.

ANNETTE [_tearing herself away_] Don’t ask me—don’t [_very low_] or I

shall die of shame.

_Lucie forces her to sit down beside her and takes her in her arms._

LUCIE. Come—into my arms. Put your head on my shoulder as you used when

you were little. There now, tell me what the trouble is. [_Speaking

low_]. My darling—my little darling—I’m afraid you’re most unhappy. Try

and think that it’s mother.

ANNETTE [_very low, crying piteously_] Oh, mother! If you knew what I

have done!

LUCIE [_rocking her gently_] There—tell me. Whisper it to me. Whisper—

_Annette whispers. Lucie rises and separates herself from her sister.

She hides her face in her hands._

LUCIE. Oh, Annette! _You!_

ANNETTE [_kneeling and stretching out her arms_] Forgive me! Forgive

me! Forgive me! I deserve it all. But I’m almost mad.

LUCIE. You, Annette! _You!_

ANNETTE. Are you going to make me sorry I didn’t kill myself before I

told you! Forgive me—

LUCIE. Get up. It’s too awful. I must forgive you. [_She sits down_].

ANNETTE [_still kneeling_] I didn’t know—I understood nothing. He took

me by surprise. I had loved him for a long time. When he was with his

regiment I used to look forward for weeks to his coming home on leave.

Just the thought of seeing him used to make me tremble. Before I even

knew myself that I was in love with him, he guessed it. He made me

tell him so when he asked me to marry him. Then one day—his father and

mother were away, and someone came and called Gabrielle, I don’t know

why. When we were alone—I didn’t understand—I thought he had suddenly

gone mad. But when he kissed me like that I was stunned—I couldn’t do

any thing—happy, and afraid, and ashamed. That was three months ago.

The next day I met him in the street. I was in such a state that he

said, quite of himself ‘I shall speak at once to my people about our

marriage.’ I know he meant it, because really he is honest and good.

Only, I suppose he hadn’t courage. Then, when I found they were going

away so soon, I said to him yesterday ‘You _must_ speak.’ And now they

don’t want me!

LUCIE. And he knows that—?

ANNETTE. No. No. Since that day—O, that day!—I’ve never been alone with

him. We say ‘monsieur’ and ’mademoiselle’ when we meet and [_in an

awestruck tone_] he is the father of my child.

LUCIE [_after a silence_] It’s not a question now of a girl not to be

married because she is poor. It’s a question of atoning for a crime.

Julien must speak to M. Bernin.

ANNETTE. You’re going to tell him?

LUCIE. I must. Go back to your room. You’re in no fit state to come

to dinner. [_She looks at the clock_] I have only just time to dress.

Directly the people are gone I shall speak to Jules. When do they go

away?

ANNETTE. In a fortnight.

LUCIE. It’s no matter. Jules shall see M. Bernin tomorrow.

ANNETTE. He won’t. He’ll have nothing more to do with me.

LUCIE. No. He will do all he can to save you.

ANNETTE. I don’t think so. Dearest, you are mistaken.

LUCIE. No, I’m not mistaken. I am _certain_. Go. [_Annette goes out_].

I’m _not_ mistaken. But if I were! If there were no one but me to

defend this child and her baby! [_A knock at the office door_]. Come

in. [_The clerk enters_] What is it?

CLERK [_laying a paper on the table_] It is the circular from the

Minister of the Interior. M. le sous-préfet told me to put it here.

ACT II

_Same scene._

_Lucie, the colonel, Madame Chevillot, Chevillot, the sous-intendant,

Brignac, Jacques Poiret, Pierre Poiret, and Laurent. The last three

are provincial mayors._

_Lucie and Madame Chevillot are in smart evening gowns; the colonel

and the sous-intendant in uniform; Chevillot and Brignac are in

evening dress; Jacques Poiret in a frock coat, and Laurent and Pierre

Poiret in morning coats._

_It is after dinner. They are drinking coffee._

PIERRE [_a tall, thin peasant, embarrassed by his coffee cup, speaks

aside to Laurent in a strong provincial accent_] A fine thing, ain’t

it, to be so rich and not have enough tables to go round.

LAURENT [_formerly a working man, to Pierre Poiret_] At lunch ’twas

just the same.

JACQUES [_a crafty farmer, putting his cup down upon the centre table,

and speaking generally_] As for me, I—

LAURENT [_passing his cup to Jacques_] M. le maire, would you mind?

PIERRE [_the same_] M. le maire, would you—?

_They get rid of their cups, passing them from one to the other._

BRIGNAC [_to the mayors_] Will you take liqueurs? [_He points to a

bottle and small glasses on a tray_].

ALL THREE [_making too much fuss about it_] Thank you, thank you, M. le

sous-préfet.

BRIGNAC. Delighted. [_He passes behind the centre table and pours out

liqueur_].

SOUS-IN [_he is small and thin and wears spectacles: a professor

disguised as a soldier_] Yes, ladies: it is an eccentricity. I

acknowledge it and beg you to excuse it: I am a collector. But you must

confess that I have not bored you with it.

COLONEL [_very much the fine gentleman_] Indeed, no, it was I who let

out the secret. But I said also that you are a learned man.

SOUS-IN. A dabbler only, colonel.

BRIGNAC [_pretending to find upon the table the circular mentioned in

the first act_] Hullo! what’s this? [_No one hears him. He puts the

circular back again upon the table_].

LUCIE [_to the sous-intendant_] And are you also a literary man?

SOUS-IN. The Intelligence Department is the literary section of the

army.

LAURENT [_to Jacques Poiret, passing him his glass_] M. le maire—?

PIERRE [_same thing_] M. le maire—?

BRIGNAC [_again taking up the circular: in a louder voice_] Hullo!

What’s this? [_They all look at him_]. It’s that very circular I was

talking about at dinner: the one from the Minister of the Interior.

COL. About the decline of the population?

BRIGNAC. Yes, colonel. This is an important official document. It

came to-day, and I have been carefully considering what can be done

to advance this movement in my own humble sphere of influence.

[_To Chevillot_] As I said to you a short time ago, M. le maire

of Châteauneuf, the Minister desires to see the whole of France

covered with associations having the increase of the population for

their object; I am certain that you will desire that this town of

Châteauneuf, of which you are the chief magistrate and in which I am

the representative of the Republic, should have the honor of being

among the first to set out upon the road indicated to us.

CHEV. I’m with you. I am a manufacturer: I am all for large populations.

BRIGNAC. You are the very man to be president of the Châteauneuf

association.

COL. I am a soldier: I also am for large populations.

LUCIE. And you, M. l’intendant?

SOUS-IN. I, madame, am a bachelor.

COL [_joking_] More shame for you!

BRIGNAC [_also joking_] It’s a scandal, monsieur, a perfect scandal.

MME. CHEV. You don’t regret it?

SOUS-IN. Ah, I don’t say that, madame.

BRIGNAC [_to the three mayors_] You have heard, messieurs les maires:

commerce and the army require the increase of the population, and the

Government commands you, therefore, to further this end to the best of

your ability, each one of you in his own commune.

_The three mayors seem annoyed. They look at one another._

PIERRE [_nervelessly_] All right, M. le sous-préfet.

LAUR [_in the same tone_] I’ll mention it.

JACQUES [_the same_] I’ll think it over.

BRIGNAC. Oh, but gentlemen, I want something more definite than that.

I am a man of action: I am not to be put off with words. ‘Acta non

verba.’ May I depend on you to set to work?

LAUR. You see, M. le sous-préfet, this’ll take a bit of thinking over.

JACQUES. Don’t be in a hurry.

BRIGNAC. We must be men of action. M. Pierre Poiret, now is your

chance, won’t you give them a lead?

PIERRE. _Me_—M. le sous-préfet?

BRIGNAC. Yes, _you_, M. le maire!

PIERRE. No—oh, no—not _me_. If you knew—no—not me. [_Pointing to his

neighbor_] My brother, Jacques Poiret: he’s your man. Ask Jacques, M.

le sous-préfet, he can’t refuse. But _me_—not me!

BRIGNAC. Then it is to be you, M. Jacques Poiret?

JACQUES. If they want to start an association in my commune, M. le

sous-préfet, they must get Thierry to see to it.

BRIGNAC. Who is Thierry?

JACQUES. My opponent at the next election.

BRIGNAC. Why?

JACQUES. Why—if he goes in for this I’m certain to get in. But about

the next commune, I can’t understand why my brother Pierre won’t.

PIERRE. Me?

JACQUES. Yes, you’re the very man.

BRIGNAC. Why?

JACQUES. Why? Because he has eight children.

BRIGNAC. You, M. Pierre Poiret, you have eight children, and you said

nothing about it! Let these ladies congratulate you.

PIERRE [_resisting_] It’s not civil, M. le sous-préfet, it’s not civil.

BRIGNAC. What d’you mean?

PIERRE. When you ask people to dinner it’s not to make fun of them.

BRIGNAC. But I’m not making fun of you.

PIERRE. You’d be the first that didn’t. _I_ can’t help it! It’s real

bad luck, that’s what it is. But it’s no reason why I should always be

made fun of.

BRIGNAC. But—

PIERRE. Yes, it’s always the same. In my commune—

BRIGNAC [_interrupting_] But I assure you—

PIERRE. In my commune they’re always joking about me. They say ‘Hey,

Pierre Poiret, there’s a prize for the twelfth!’ Or they say ‘Pierre

Poiret’—and there isn’t a single day they don’t say it, and everyone

thinks it’s funny, and they split with laughing—they say ‘Pierre

Poiret’—only—hum—not before the ladies. [_Jacques Poiret is holding his

sides_] Just look at that fool! I’m sure he brought the talk round to

that a’ purpose.

BRIGNAC. No, no.

PIERRE. I bet you he did. Whenever we’re in company it’s the same

thing. I won’t go about with him any more.

BRIGNAC. But your position is most honorable.

PIERRE. And the worst of it is that he’s right. I call myself a fool

myself when I’m alone. [_Jacques Poiret goes on laughing_] Look at

him—grinning—look!—because he’s only got two. [_To his brother_] You

puppy!

COL [_to Pierre Poiret_] You deserve the greatest credit, M. Pierre

Poiret.

BRIGNAC. You do.

CHEV. You do, indeed, monsieur.

COL [_to Pierre Poiret_] In comparing your conduct with your brother’s

all men of real worth will blame him and congratulate you, as I do,

most sincerely. [_He shakes him by the hand_].

CHEV [_to Pierre Poiret_] Bravo, monsieur! You are helping us in our

great work. [_He shakes him by the hand_].

JACQUES [_looking at his brother_] They _seem_ as if they meant it!

BRIGNAC [_to Jacques Poiret_] You, monsieur, have chosen the easier and

more agreeable life; don’t be surprised if we look upon your brother as

the more meritorious, though you may be cleverer.

PIERRE [_striking his thigh_] That’s the talk. [_To his brother_] Put

that in your pipe, M. Jacques.

JACQUES. All right. You are the most meritorious. Is that what you’re

going to pay your baker with?

PIERRE. Shut up! I’m the best citizen! I’m the most meritorious!

JACQUES. H’m—yes. What does that bring you in?

SOUS-IN. _I_ will tell you that, monsieur. It brings in to your

brother, as the poet says, ‘The joy of duty done.’

JACQUES. H’m. _That_ won’t put butter on his bread.

SOUS-IN. That is true. But one can’t have everything.

PIERRE [_to Brignac, pointing to his brother_] He’s right, monsieur.

For the once that I’ve been complimented, I’ve had to go through some

bad times.

BRIGNAC. You mustn’t think of that.

PIERRE. Oh—mustn’t I? Go along! _He’s_ right.

BRIGNAC. He’s not.

PIERRE. Yes, he is.

CHEV. and COL. No, no.

PIERRE. Yes, he is.

BRIGNAC. No. It’s possible that some people might think so now; but in

ten years the tables will be turned. He may die lonely, while you will

have a happy old age with your children and your grandchildren.

PIERRE. Perhaps it was like that once; but nowadays as soon as the

children can get along by themselves, off they go!

CHEV. Even so they will send you help if you need it.

JACQUES. They couldn’t help him, even if they wanted to.

COL. Why not?

JACQUES. Because as there were eight he couldn’t do anything for them,

so they’ll only be struggling, hand-to-mouth creatures; not earning

enough to keep themselves, much less help him.

PIERRE. And he’s been able to bring up his well. He’s only one girl:

he gave her a fortune and she made a fine marriage. He’s only one

boy: he was able to send him to Grignon and he’ll earn big money like

his father. No: it’s no use your talking. They’re right when they say

’Well, Poiret,’—h’m—not before the ladies.

_He goes to the table, pours himself out a glass of cognac and drinks

it._

COL. I regret to say we have become too far-seeing a nation. Everyone

thinks of his own future: no one thinks of the good of the community.

BRIGNAC. In former times people troubled less about the future. They

had faith, and remembered the words of the Scriptures, ‘Consider the

lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they

spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was

not arrayed like one of these.’

LUCIE. And yet there are little children going about in rags.

SOUS-IN. God must be less interested in them than in the lilies of the

field.

COL [_to Jacques Poiret_] But, monsieur, you need hands, too, in

harvest-time.

JACQUES. I have a cutting-and-binding machine. It does the work of

twelve men, and only cost a thousand francs. A child costs more.

CHEV. We must have workmen to make machines.

JACQUES. We buy the machines ready-made in America much cheaper than we

can make them in France.

CHEV. If there were a greater number of workmen we might cut down wages

and produce at lower prices.

JACQUES. Cut down wages! The workmen are complaining already that they

can’t live on their wages.

CHEV. Bah! give them twenty francs a day, and they’ll still complain.

SOUS-IN. You have not tried that yet.

COL. My dear fellow, remember that, as a bachelor, you are out of this

discussion.

SOUS-IN. I withdraw.

CHEV. I didn’t mean that for you, Laurent. [_To the Colonel_] M.

Laurent, the mayor of Ste. Geneviève, was formerly a workman of mine,

but he came into a little money, and went back to his native place.

[_To Laurent_] No—I didn’t mean it for you; but they’re not all like

you, you know.

BRIGNAC [_to Laurent_] So you refuse to form an association too?

LAUR. Refuse, M. le sous-préfet? No.

BRIGNAC. At last! Here’s a mayor who understands his duties. He’ll

start the thing among his people, and before long we shall have the

commune of Ste. Geneviève setting an example to the whole of France.

LAUR. Don’t get that into your head, monsieur; you’ll be disappointed.

BRIGNAC. No, no.

LAUR. Whether you form your association or don’t form your association,

the people at home are too sensible to have more children than they’ve

cradles for. They know too well they must put a bit by.

BRIGNAC. If you think that an association will make no difference why

do you agree to form one?

LAUR. Because I want you to get me what you promised me.

BRIGNAC. What was that?

LAUR. You know.

BRIGNAC. No, I don’t.

_Laurent touches his buttonhole._

BRIGNAC [_angrily_] Is that what we’ve come to? We were speaking of the

good of the community.

CHEV [_the same_] It’s most discouraging. We point out to you that the

trade of the country is in danger.

BRIGNAC. And you only think of yourself.

CHEV. You only think of yourself.

BRIGNAC. What a want of public spirit!

CHEV. Bad citizenship!

LAUR [_getting excited_] Oh, yes! Making the poor do everything! Go

and talk to the middle classes, who’ve money enough to rear children by

the dozen, and who’ve fewer than the workmen. Here’s M. Chevillot: he

has twenty thousand francs a year, I have two thousand. When he has ten

children, then I’ll have one. That’ll be fair and square, won’t it now?

CHEV. These personalities—

LAUR. Is it true that you’ve only one son?

CHEV. It’s true. But if I had several my works would have to be sold at

my death, and—

LAUR. There we are. These gentlemen are too precious careful about the

fortunes they leave their own children; but when it’s a question of the

workmen’s children, they think it don’t matter if there ain’t enough

victuals to go round.

CHEV. It is to the interest of the workmen that my works should be

prosperous.

LAUR. But you only take unmarried men.

CHEV. I beg your pardon—I—

LAUR. Is it true?

CHEV. It’s because of the Employers’ Liability Bill. Let me

explain—[_Laurent turns his back on him. He addresses himself

to Brignac_] Allow me to—[_Brignac does not listen. To the

sous-intendant_] If I was allowed to explain you would understand. I’m

perfectly consistent.

LAUR. Are we to do as you say, or are we to do as you do? If you

believed what you say you’d act accordingly.

CHEV. But—

BRIGNAC. We shouldn’t indulge in these personalities. We must look

higher. Lift up your hearts. Sursum corda. You have just heard,

gentlemen, that commerce and the army protest against the decline of

the population. And I, the representative of the Government of this

country, tell you, in concert with commerce and the army, that there

must be more births.

LAUR. And what’s the Government doing?

BRIGNAC. What is it doing!—well—and this circular?

SOUS-IN. We must be just. Besides this circular, the Government has

appointed a Commission to enquire into the matter.

BRIGNAC. Various measures are being brought up.

LAUR. When they’re passed—we’ll see.

BRIGNAC. Those who have a large family will be exempted from taxation.

LAUR. From what taxes?

BRIGNAC. What taxes! The taxes you pay to the collector, of course.

LAUR. Listen, M. le sous-préfet. The poor pay next to nothing of those

taxes. They pay the _real_ taxes: the taxes upon bread, wine, salt,

tobacco: and they’ll go on paying them. The more children you have, the

more money the State takes from you.

SOUS-IN. Pray do not forget that the State proposes to confer a

decoration upon every mother of seven children.

PIERRE [_to Laurent_] There you are!

JACQUES. M. le sous-préfet, we must be off. We’ve a long way to go.

BRIGNAC [_to Jacques_] Good night, M. le maire.

PIERRE [_tipsy_] I’m all right here. Why go ’way?

LAUR. I’m a fool, M. Brignac. I’m afraid I’ve been setting you against

me. I’ll start an association—trust me. Good night. Good night, madame.

JACQUES. Good night, madame.

LUCIE. Good night, good night.

PIERRE. Good night, ladies, gents, and—hic—the company.

_They go out, accompanied by Brignac._

COL [_to Lucie and Madame Chevillot_] I’m afraid we’ve bored you,

ladies, with our discussion.

LUCIE. Not at all.

COL. I notice that women are usually a little impatient if we talk of

these questions.

SOUS-IN. As impatient as we should be if they discussed the recruiting

laws without consulting us.

MME. CHEV. Precisely.

COL [_to Lucie_] Perhaps, too, you don’t agree with us.

LUCIE. You’ll never make women understand why children must be created

to be killed in your battles.

COL [_to the sous-intendant_] There, that’s how the military ruin of a

country is brought about.

SOUS-IN. You’re right, colonel, if it be true that power is a function

of number.

COL. Well, isn’t it?

SOUS-IN. Those who believe the contrary say ‘There is no evidence in

history that supremacy, even military supremacy, has ever belonged to

the most numerous peoples.’ I quote M. de Varigny. General von der

Gotz shares this opinion, and our own General Serval says, ’All great

military operations have been performed by small armies.’

_Brignac comes in._

COL. Oh, ho, Mr. Bachelor, you’ve got all the arguments on your side at

your finger-ends.

BRIGNAC. We shall make laws against you and your like, M. le

sous-intendant. We shall make it impossible for you to receive money

by will, as the Romans did. We shall make you pay fines, as the Greeks

did. And we’ll invent something new, if necessary.

SOUS-IN. Compulsory paternity!

COL. One may fairly ask whether people have the right to shirk these

obligations.

SOUS-IN. Some people think it is their duty.

BRIGNAC. Their duty!

SOUS-IN. Are you sure that all men who don’t marry are bachelors from

pure selfishness?

COL. Of course, we’re not speaking of you personally.

SOUS-IN. Do so, by all means. It was not out of mere lightness of heart

that I deprived myself of the tenderness of a wife and the caresses of

a child. When I was young I was poor and sickly. I did not choose to

bring children into the world when I had nothing to leave them but my

bad constitution. I said, in the words of a great poet:

Remain

In the elusive realm of might-have-been,

O son more loved than any ever born!

I thought it better to be lonely than let the stock go from bad to

worse. I believe it is a crime to bring a child into the world if

one cannot give it health and bring it up well. We saw one hundred

conscripts this morning, colonel, and we passed sixty. Would it not

have been better if there had only been eighty and we could have passed

them all?

COL. Perhaps you are right. I said what I said because I’ve heard it so

constantly repeated.

SOUS-IN. When there are healthy houses and food and clothing for

everyone it will be time to think of adding to the number.

LUCIE. That is very true.

CHEV. You evidently don’t share M. Brignac’s ideas, madame.

BRIGNAC. Oh, indeed she does. Madame Brignac and I have three children,

and we don’t mean to stop there: so my wife may qualify for that

decoration some day.

LUCIE [_to Chevillot_] As far as I can see, M. le maire, when children

are born now society does not always make them welcome.

BRIGNAC. I think, my dear, that you had better leave the discussion of

this important question to the gentlemen.

LUCIE. But surely it has some interest for us women! I hear everyone

else consulted about it—political people and business people—but nobody

ever thinks of consulting us.

BRIGNAC. Far from not welcoming the children that are born, society—

LUCIE [_to Brignac_] Stop! Do you remember what happened lately, not a

hundred miles from here? I mean about the servant who was turned out

into the street because she was going to have a baby. She will have

to go to some hospital for her confinement. And after that what will

happen to her and her child?

BRIGNAC [_to the others_] Madame Brignac speaks of something which

took place recently in a most respectable family. The incident has

nothing whatever to do with the principles we are defending. It is

clear that one cannot have a servant in that condition in a well-kept

house. And there are higher considerations which will always prevent

a respectable citizen from even appearing to condone immorality by

sheltering it. One must not offer a premium to evil-doing.

CHEV. Very true.

LUCIE. And the unfortunate girl, who is very likely only the victim of

another person, is condemned by everyone.

BRIGNAC [_timidly_] No, no, I don’t say that. I myself am very liberal,

and I confess that in—exceptional circumstances—one should be indulgent

to her.

LUCIE. Very well. Don’t forget you have said that.

COL. Good night, madame. I must be going. Thank you for a charming

evening.

CHEV. I also, madame—charming.

BRIGNAC [_pointing to the door into his office_] This way. As you go

out I want to shew you a diagram I have had done, by which you can make

yourself acquainted at a single glance with the political conditions of

the division. There is an arrangement of pins—[_They hesitate_]. One

minute. It will only take a minute. You can go out through the office.

One minute—while you are putting on your coats. The coats are in there.

I’m going out with you to a reception at the club. You’ll see—it’s

rather curious. [_To Lucie, aside_] You come too. [_Aloud_] I think the

idea is ingenious.

_He talks them all off. When they are gone there is a short pause,

and then Catherine opens the door at the back and steps forward._

CATHERINE [_to Annette, who has come into the anteroom_] Yes,

mademoiselle, they are all gone.

_Annette comes in. She takes off her hat and cloak and hands them to

Catherine, who takes them into the anteroom and comes back to turn

out the principal electric lights and to take away the tray. Annette,

with fixed, staring eyes, sits rigidly upon the couch. Lucie comes

in._

LUCIE. Annette! Where have you been?

ANNETTE. I have been to see Jacques Bernin.

LUCIE. You have seen him? You have spoken to him?

ANNETTE. I went to his father’s house.

LUCIE. Well?

ANNETTE. There is no hope.

LUCIE. What did they say to you?

ANNETTE. I oughtn’t ever to tell anyone about the two hours I have just

lived through. It’s too shameful. Too vile. What I can’t believe is

that all that really happened to _me_, and that I am alive still.

LUCIE [_tenderly_] Tell me all about it.

ANNETTE. What’s the good of my telling you? It’s all over. There’s

nothing left. He didn’t love me: he never loved me. He’s gone. He’s

going to marry another woman.

LUCIE. He’s _gone_?

ANNETTE. He went this evening. They all went. M. and Madame Bernin and

Gabrielle dined at the station; Jacques dined at a restaurant with some

friends. I went there. I sent up for him. From where I was standing, in

the vestibule, I heard their jokes when the waiter gave him my message.

LUCIE [_in gentle reproach_] Annette!

ANNETTE. I wanted to know. I was certain his people were taking him

away by force, and I was making excuses for him. I was certain he

loved me. I should have laughed if anyone had told me he wouldn’t be

horrified when he heard what had happened to me. I thought that when he

knew, he’d take my hand, and go with me to his people, and say ‘Whether

you wish it or not, here is my wife.’ As I was sure it would end like

that, I thought it was better it should be over at once. I expected to

come back here to beg your pardon—to kiss you and comfort you.

LUCIE. And what did he say?

ANNETTE [_without listening_] I think I’ve gone mad. All _that_

happened, and I’m here. I’m quiet: I’m not crying: it’s as if I was

paralysed.

LUCIE. You said you sent a message to him at the restaurant?

ANNETTE. Yes.

LUCIE. Did he come?

ANNETTE. Yes. He said he thought some chorus-girl wanted him.

LUCIE. Oh! And when he found it was you?

ANNETTE. He took me out into the street for fear I should be

recognized, and I had to explain it to him in the street. [_A pause_].

People passing by stared at us, and some of them laughed. [_With

passion and pain_] Oh! if I only had no memory!

LUCIE. Tell me, darling, tell me.

ANNETTE [_with violence_] Oh, I’ll tell you. You’ll despise me a

little more; but what can that matter to me now? First he pretended not

to understand me: he forced me to say it quite plainly: he did it on

purpose—either to torture me, or to give himself time to think. You’ll

never guess what he said—that it wasn’t true.

LUCIE. Oh!

ANNETTE. Yes, that it wasn’t true. He got angry, and he began to

abuse me. He said he guessed what I was up to; that I wanted to make

a scandal to force him to marry me—oh, he spared me nothing—to force

him to marry me because he was rich. And when that made me furious,

he threatened to call the police! I ought to have left him, run away,

come home, oughtn’t I? But I couldn’t believe it of him all at once,

like that! And I couldn’t go away while I had any hope. You see, as

long as I was with him, nothing was settled: as long as I was holding

to his arm it was as if I was engaged. When he was gone I should

only be a miserable ruined girl, like dozens of others. Then—I was

afraid of making him angry: my life was at stake: and to save myself

I went down into the very lowest depths of vileness and cowardice. I

cried, I implored. I lost all shame and I offered to go with him to a

doctor to-morrow to prove that what I told him was true. And what he

said then I cannot tell you—not even you—it was too much—_too_ much—I

didn’t understand at first. It was only afterwards, coming back, going

over all his words, that I made out what he meant. He didn’t believe

what he said. He _couldn’t_ have believed what he said. At any rate he

knows that I am not a girl out of the streets. But at first I didn’t

understand. Then—where was I? I don’t remember—At last he looked at

his watch and said he had only just time to catch the train. He said

good-bye and started off at a great pace to the station. I followed

him imploring and crying. I was so ashamed of my cowardice. It was

horrible and absurd! I couldn’t believe it was the end of everything.

I was all out of breath—almost running—and I prayed him for the sake

of his child, for the sake of my love, of my misery, of my very life;

and I took hold of his arm to keep him back. My God! what must I have

looked like! At the station entrance he said, ‘Let go your hold of

me.’ I said, ‘You shall _not_ go.’ Then he rushed to the train, and

jumped into a carriage, and almost crushed my fingers in the door;

and he went and hid behind his mother, and she threatened too to have

me arrested. And Gabrielle sat there looking white and pretending not

to know me. I came back. I haven’t had courage enough to kill myself,

but I wish I was dead! [_Breaking into sobs, and in a voice of earnest

supplication_] Lucie, dear, I don’t want to go through all that’s

coming—I’m too little, I’m too weak, I’m too young to bear it. Really,

I haven’t the strength.

LUCIE. Annette—don’t say that. Hush, my darling, hush. In the first

place, everything hasn’t been tried. You have entreated these people;

now we must threaten.

ANNETTE. It’ll be no use.

LUCIE. It _will_ be of use. The way they’re hurrying away shews how

afraid they are of scandal. As soon as my husband comes in I will tell

him all about it.

ANNETTE. Oh, my God!

LUCIE. He will go down and see them. He will threaten them with an

action. They will give in.

ANNETTE. We can’t bring an action against them. He told me so.

LUCIE. Then there are other ways of defending you. Believe me, I’m sure

of it.

ANNETTE. There are _not_.

LUCIE. There are. And even if there weren’t, you mustn’t talk of dying

at your age. Am I not here? Annette, Annette, my little one, I will

help you through this trouble! You believe me, don’t you? You know how

I love you? You know that mother left you in my care? I’ll help you and

comfort you and love you so well that you’ll forget.

ANNETTE. Forget!

LUCIE. Yes, yes; people forget. If it weren’t for that no one would be

alive.

ANNETTE. I feel as if I had lived a hundred years. Life is hard, hard;

too hard.

LUCIE. Life is hard for all women.

ANNETTE. It’s worse for me than for anyone else.

LUCIE. Oh, Annette! If you only knew!

ANNETTE. When I’ve seen mothers with their little children I’ve had

such dreams.

LUCIE. If you only knew! Those mothers had their own troubles. Nearly

every woman carries about with her the corpse of the woman she might

have been.

ANNETTE. Ah, Lucie, dear, it’s easy for you to talk.

LUCIE. Darling, you mustn’t think you’re alone in your sorrow. I seem

to you to be happy with my children and my husband, and you think my

happiness makes light of your distress. But you’re wrong. Your misery

makes me so weak, I must tell you what I wanted always to hide from

you. My husband does not love me. I don’t love him. Can you realize the

loneliness of that? If you knew what it means to live with an enemy and

to have to endure his caresses!

ANNETTE. My poor dear!

LUCIE. So you see, Annette, you mustn’t think about dying, because

perhaps I shall want your help as much as you want mine. I heard the

door shut. It’s Julien.

ANNETTE. Don’t tell him: please don’t. Spare me the shame.

LUCIE. Go away, now.

ANNETTE. You’ve given me back a little hope. Dearest sister help me, I

have nobody else.

LUCIE. Go!

_She goes: Brignac comes in._

BRIGNAC [_making for the door of his office_] Not gone to bed yet? I

had a stroke of luck at the club. I met the editor of the ‘Independent’

and I promised to write him an article about the minister’s circular

for to-morrow’s paper. An official’s day is sometimes pretty full, eh?

LUCIE. Julien, I have something very important to tell you. A great

misfortune has happened to us.

BRIGNAC. Good heavens, what is it? The children?

LUCIE. No, it has to do with Annette.

BRIGNAC. You said she didn’t come to dinner because of a headache. Have

you been concealing something?

LUCIE. She is not ill, but she is cruelly and grievously unhappy.

BRIGNAC. Nonsense! Unhappiness at her age! A love affair. Some marriage

she had set her heart on.

LUCIE. Yes, a marriage she had set her heart on.

BRIGNAC. Ouf! I breathe again. What a fright you gave me! _That’s_ not

of much consequence.

LUCIE. Yes, it’s of the greatest consequence. Julien, I appeal to your

heart, to your kindliness, to your best feelings.

BRIGNAC. But what’s the matter?

LUCIE. Annette made the mistake of trusting entirely to the man she

loved, who had promised to marry her. He took advantage of the child’s

innocent love. She has been seduced. [_In a low voice_] Understand me,

Julien, she’s going to have a baby in six months.

BRIGNAC. Annette!

LUCIE. Annette.

BRIGNAC. It’s impossible. It’s—

LUCIE. She is certain of it. She told me about it herself.

BRIGNAC [_after a silence_] Who is it?

LUCIE. Jacques Bernin.

BRIGNAC [_furious_] Jacques Bernin! Well, _this_ is a nice piece of

work! She goes it, this little sister of yours, with her innocent airs!

LUCIE. Don’t accuse her. Don’t.

BRIGNAC. I really cannot compliment her! I’m nicely repaid for all I’ve

done for her, and you may thank her from me for her gratitude.

LUCIE. Oh, don’t be angry.

BRIGNAC. Well, if you are able to hear news like this perfectly calmly,

you are certainly endowed with unusual self-control.

LUCIE. It was the child’s innocence that made the thing possible.

BRIGNAC. I daresay. Go and tell that to the Châteauneuf people!

Besides, if she was so innocent, why didn’t you look after her better?

LUCIE. But it was _you_ who were always urging her to go to the Bernins.

BRIGNAC. In another minute it’s going to be all my fault! I was glad

she should go to their house because I thought old Bernin might be

useful to us. How should I know that the girl couldn’t behave herself?

LUCIE [_indignantly_] Oh, hush! I tell you Annette is the victim of

this wretch. If you are going to do nothing but insult her, we had

better stop discussing the matter.

BRIGNAC. I’m in a nice fix now! There’s nothing left for us but to pack

our trunks and be off. I’m done for, ruined! smashed!

LUCIE. You exaggerate.

BRIGNAC. I exaggerate! I tell you if she was caught red-handed

_stealing_, the wreck wouldn’t be more complete. I even think that

would have been better. I should be less definitely compromized, and

less disqualified.

LUCIE. You can abuse her by and by: the business now is to save her.

The Bernins have gone away this evening; find them to-morrow; and,

if you speak to them as you ought, they’ll understand that their son

_must_ marry Annette.

BRIGNAC. But Jacques Bernin is engaged.

LUCIE. He must break it off, that’s all.

BRIGNAC. He won’t break it off, because it means lots and lots of

money, and because he is the most ferocious little fortune-hunter I

ever met. Yes, he is; I know him, I see him at the club. I’ve heard him

holding forth about women and money; his opinions are edifying. By the

way, has Annette any letters from him connecting him with this business?

LUCIE. No.

BRIGNAC. He’s not such a fool as to compromize himself. He’ll deny

everything.

LUCIE. You must threaten them with a scandal.

BRIGNAC. We should be the first to suffer from that.

LUCIE. But we must do something. We must bring an action.

BRIGNAC. There is no affiliation law in France.

LUCIE. You refuse to go and see what can be done with the Bernins?

BRIGNAC. Not at all. I say that it would be a useless journey.

LUCIE. Then what are we to do?

BRIGNAC. Not a soul in Châteauneuf must know what has happened.

Fortunately we have a little time.

LUCIE. What are you going to do?

BRIGNAC. We’ll see. We’ll think it over. One doesn’t come to a decision

of this importance in ten minutes.

LUCIE. I want to know what you are going to do. Your point of view

surprises me so much that I wish to understand it completely.

BRIGNAC. Understand this, then: if the matter is kept secret, it is

only our misfortune; if it becomes public, it will be a scandal.

LUCIE. How can it be kept secret?

BRIGNAC. We must pack Annette off before anyone suspects.

LUCIE. Where is she to go?

BRIGNAC. Ah! that’s the devil. Where—where? If only we had some friends

we could trust, in some out-of-the-way place, far away. But we haven’t.

Still, we _must_ send her somewhere.

LUCIE. Oh, my God! [_She sobs_].

BRIGNAC [_irritated_] For Heaven’s sake don’t cry like that. That

doesn’t mend matters. We must make some excuse. We’ll invent an aunt or

a cousin who’s invited her to stay. I will find a decent house in Paris

for her to go to. She’ll be all right there. When the time comes she

can put the child out to nurse in the country, and come back to us. I

shall certainly have got my promotion by that time: we shall have left

this place, and the situation will be saved—as far as it can be saved.

LUCIE. You propose that to me and you think I shall consent to it!

BRIGNAC. Why not?

LUCIE. You’ve not stopped to think. That’s your only excuse.

BRIGNAC. I must say, I don’t see—

LUCIE. You seriously propose to send that poor child to Paris, where

she doesn’t know a soul?

BRIGNAC. What do you mean by that? I will go to Paris myself, if

necessary. There are special boarding-houses: very respectable ones.

I’ll inquire: of course without letting out that it is for anyone I

know. And I’ll pay what is necessary. What more can you want? We shall

be sure of keeping the thing quiet that way. I believe there are houses

in Paris subsidized by the State, and the people who stay in them need

not even give their names.

LUCIE. I tell you, you’ve not stopped to think. Just when the child is

most in need of every care, you propose to send her off alone; _alone_,

do you understand, alone! To tear her away from here, put her into a

train, and send her off to Paris, like a sick animal you want to get

rid of. It would be enough to make her kill herself.

BRIGNAC. Can you think of anything better?

LUCIE. Everything is better than that. If I consented to that I should

feel that I was as bad as the man who seduced her. Be honest, Julien:

remember it is in our interest you propose to sacrifice her. We shall

gain peace and quiet at the price of her loneliness and despair. To

save ourselves trouble—serious trouble, I admit—we are to abandon this

child to strangers. She does not know the meaning of harshness or

unkindness; and we are to drive her away now—now, of all times! Away

from all love and care and comfort, without a friend to put kind arms

round her and let her sob her grief away. I implore you, Julien, I

entreat you, for our children’s sake, don’t keep me from her, don’t ask

me to do this shameful thing. I will _not_ do it! We must do something

else. Make _me_ suffer if you like, but don’t add abandonment and

loneliness to the misery of my poor little helpless sister.

BRIGNAC. There would have been no question of misery if she had behaved

herself.

LUCIE. She is this man’s victim! But she won’t go. You’ll have to

drive her out as you drove out the servant. Have you the courage?

Just think of what her life will be. Try to realize the long months

of waiting in that dreadful house: the slow development of the poor

little creature that she will know beforehand is condemned to all the

risks children run when they are separated from their mothers. And

when she is torn with tortures, and cries out in that fearful anguish

I know so well, and jealous death seems to be hovering over the bed of

martyrdom, waiting for mother and child; just when one is overcome by

the terror and amazement of the mystery accomplished in oneself; then,

then—there’ll be only strangers with her. And if her poor anguished

eyes look round for an answering look, perhaps the last; if she feels

for a hand to cling to; she will see round her bed only men doing a

duty, and women going through a routine. And then—after _that_—she’s to

let her child go; to stifle her strongest instinct; to silence the cry

of love that consoles us all for the tortures we have to go through; to

turn away her eyes and say ’Take him away, I don’t want him.’ And at

_that_ price she’s to be forgiven for another person’s crime!

BRIGNAC. But what can I do? I can’t alter the world, can I? The world

is made like that. If Annette was ten times more innocent she couldn’t

stay here.

LUCIE. I—

BRIGNAC [_violently_] And I don’t choose that she shall stay here. Do

you understand? I’m sorry she has to go by herself to Paris. But once

more, if she had behaved respectably she wouldn’t be obliged to do it.

LUCIE. Oh!

BRIGNAC. Can’t you understand that she would suffer much more here,

surrounded by people who know her, than she would there, where she

would be unknown? Here she couldn’t so much as go down the street

without exposing herself to insult. Why, if she even went to mass or

to a concert after her condition became evident, it would be a kind of

provocation; people would avoid her as if she had the plague. Mothers

would sneer and tell their daughters not to look at her, and men would

smile in a way that would be an outrage.

LUCIE. If necessary she can stay at home.

BRIGNAC. Stay at home! Rubbish! What would be the good of that?

Servants would talk, and the scandal would be all the greater. And

you haven’t reflected that the consequences would fall upon me. You

haven’t troubled to consider me, or to remember the drawback this will

be to me. I am not alluding to the imbecile jokes people are sure to

make about the apostle of repopulation. But our respectability will

be called in question. People will remark that there are families in

which such things don’t happen. Political hatred and social prejudice

will help them to invent all sorts of tales. And the allusions, the

suggestions, the pretended pity! There would be nothing left for me but

to send in my resignation!

LUCIE. Send it in.

BRIGNAC. Yes, and what should we live upon then?

LUCIE [_after a silence_] Then _that_ is society’s welcome to the

newborn child!

BRIGNAC. To the child born outside marriage, yes. If it wasn’t for that

there would soon be nothing but illegitimate births. It is to preserve

the family that society condemns the natural child.

LUCIE. If there is guilt two people are guilty. Why do you only punish

the mother?

BRIGNAC. What am I to say to you? Because it’s easier.

LUCIE. And that’s your justice! The truth is, you all uphold the

conventions of society. You do. And the proof is that if Annette stayed

here in the town to have her baby, you’d all cry shame upon her; but

if she goes to Paris and has it secretly and gets rid of it, nobody

will blame her. Let’s be honest, and call things by their names: it

is not immorality that is condemned, but motherhood. You say you want

a larger number of births, and at the same time you say to women ‘No

motherhood without marriage, and no marriage without money.’ As long as

you’ve not changed _that_ all your circulars will be met with shouts of

derision—half from hate, half from pity!

BRIGNAC. Possibly. Good night. I’m going to work.

LUCIE. Listen—Then you drive Annette from your house?

BRIGNAC. I don’t drive her from my house. I beg her to go elsewhere.

LUCIE. I shall go with her.

BRIGNAC. You mean, leave me?

LUCIE. Yes.

BRIGNAC. Then you don’t love me.

LUCIE. No.

BRIGNAC. Ah! Here’s another story. Since when?

LUCIE. I never loved you.

BRIGNAC. You married me.

LUCIE. Not for love.

BRIGNAC. This is most interesting. Go on.

LUCIE. You’re another victim of the state of society you are defending.

BRIGNAC. I don’t understand.

LUCIE. I was a penniless girl, and so I had no offers of marriage. When

you proposed to me I was tired of waiting, and I didn’t want to be an

old maid. I accepted you, but I knew you only came to me because the

women with money wouldn’t have you. I made up my mind to love you and

be loyal.

BRIGNAC. Well?

LUCIE. But when my first baby came you deceived me. Since then I

have only endured you, and you owe my submission to my cowardice. It

was only my first child I wanted, the others you forced upon me, and

when each was coming you left me. It’s true I was unattractive, but

that was not my fault. You left me day after day in my ugliness and

loneliness, and when you came back to me from those other women, you

were full of false solicitude about my health. I begged for a rest

after nursing. I asked to be allowed to live a little for myself, to

be a mother only with my own consent. You laughed at me in a vain,

foolish way. You did not consider the future of your children or the

life of your wife, but you forced upon me the danger and the suffering

of bringing another child into the world. What was it to you? Just the

satisfaction of your vanity. You could jest with your friends and make

coarse witticisms about it. Fool!

BRIGNAC. That’s enough, thank you. You’re my wife—

LUCIE. I’ll not be your wife any longer, and I won’t have another child.

BRIGNAC. Why?

LUCIE. Because I’ve just found out what the future of my poor,

penniless little girls is to be. It’s to be Annette’s fate, or mine.

Oh, to think I’ve been cruel enough to bring three of them into the

world already!

BRIGNAC. You’re mad. And be good enough not to put on these independent

airs. They’re perfectly useless.

LUCIE. You think so?

BRIGNAC. I am sure of it. If you have had enough of me, get a divorce.

LUCIE. But you would keep the children?

BRIGNAC. Naturally. And let me tell you that as long as you are my wife

before the world, you’ll be my wife really.

LUCIE. And you will force me to have a child whenever you please?

BRIGNAC. Most certainly.

LUCIE. My God! They think a woman’s body is like the clay of the

fields; they want to drag harvest after harvest from it until it is

worn out and done for! I refuse this slavery, and I shall leave you if

you turn out my sister.

BRIGNAC. And your children?

LUCIE. I will take them with me.

BRIGNAC. And their food?

LUCIE. I will work.

BRIGNAC. Don’t talk nonsense. You couldn’t earn enough to keep them

from starving. It’s late: go to bed.

LUCIE [_her teeth clenched_] And wait for you?

BRIGNAC. And wait for me. Precisely. [_He goes out_].

LUCIE [_rushing to the door on the left_] Annette! Oh, Annette! There’s

nobody to help us!

ACT III

_A court house, of which only two sides are visible. The footlights

would almost correspond with a line drawn from one angle to the

opposite one. On the left to the front is the raised seat of the

public Minister. Further back, to the left, the court. Facing the

audience, successively, counsels’ bench; the defendants’ bench, a

little raised; and the police bench._

_In the centre, facing the table on which lie the ‘pièces à

conviction,’ is the witness-box._

_To the extreme right are three or four benches, of which a part only

is visible, reserved for the public. The jury, which is not visible,

would be in the prompter’s place._

_There are present the advocate-general: the president of the court

and his assessors; also the counsel for the defence and some junior

barristers. In the dock are Madame Thomas, Marie Caubert, Tupin,

Madame Tupin and several policemen. Madame Chevillot is among the

public._

PRESIDENT [_authoritatively, to the counsel for the defence_] Maître

Verdier, you cannot speak now. I see what line you propose to take for

the defence, and I give you fair warning that I shall use my whole

power and authority to prevent you from making light of the criminal

acts attributed to the defendants.

COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENCE. You are mistaken, M. le président. I have

no intention of making light of them. On the contrary, I declare

definitely that in my eyes abortion is a crime, because it deprives

of life a creature already living; and to condone it would lead to

condoning infanticide also. But what I propose to demonstrate is that

in not permitting affiliation and in not respecting all motherhood,

whatever its origin may be, society has lost its right to condemn

a crime rendered excusable by the hypocrisy of custom and the

indifference of the laws.

PRES. This is not the time for your address. Let the woman Thomas stand

up. [_To Madame Thomas_] So you hunted up your clients in the provinces?

MME. THOMAS. No, M. le président. They came and found me.

PRES. We shall see. Usher, bring forward the witness—[_he hunts for the

name in his notes_]—Madame Lucie Brignac.

MME. CHEV [_among the audience, to her neighbor_] Mustn’t Brignac be

in a hurry to get his divorce!

_Lucie has approached the witness-bar. She is thinner and older._

PRES [_to the usher_] Has the witness been sworn?

USHER. Yes, M. le président.

PRES [_to Lucie_] Was it of her own free will that your sister,

the unfortunate Annette Jarras, in consequence of whose death the

defendants have been arrested, came to Paris and placed herself in the

hands of this woman?

LUCIE. Yes, M. le président.

PRES. Very well. Go and sit down. I will call you again presently.

[_Lucie retires to her place, sobbing_]. Marie Caubert, come forward.

[_A small, thin woman rises_]. Your name is Marie Caubert? How old are

you?

SCHOOLMISTRESS. Twenty-seven.

PRES. Profession?

SCH. Schoolmistress.

PRES. You have come from the country, too: do you know what you are

accused of?

SCH. Yes, M. le président.

PRES. What have you to say in your defence?

SCH. I did not know I was doing wrong.

PRES. Your levity amazes me. You are a schoolmistress, and you do not

realize that the sacred mission with which you are entrusted, the

mission of preparing citizens and citizenesses for the glories of the

future, demands that your life should be exemplary. You are appointed

to give the elementary course of lessons in civic morality: is it thus

that you practise that morality? You have no answer? According to the

notes I have here you insisted upon nursing your two children yourself.

Do you love them?

SCH. It was just because I love them.

PRES. But you decided that two were enough. You ventured to limit the

work of the Creator.

SCH. I should have liked nothing better than to have four or five

children.

PRES. Indeed! Then allow me to inform you that you’ve not taken the

best means for arriving at that desirable result. [_He laughs, turning

to his assessor on the right, who laughs also_].

SCH. One must have money enough to bring them up.

PRES. Ah! Stop a moment. If some people were to make that bad excuse I

might understand it. But from you, who enjoy the inestimable advantage

of being under the protection of the State, I do not understand it. You

are never out of work.

SCH. I earn 83 francs a month, and my husband, who teaches too, earns

the same. That makes 166 francs a month to live on and to rear two

children. When there were four of us we could just scrape along, but

with five we couldn’t have managed it.

PRES. You forget to mention that when your children are coming you have

a right to a month’s holiday on full salary.

SCH. Yes, at one time, M. le président, but not now. In 1900 a

ministerial circular announced to us that there was not enough money,

and we could practically only have holidays at half salary. To get the

whole salary we must have a certificate from the inspector, giving

reasons. One has to petition for it.

PRES. Well, then one petitions.

SCH. It’s hard to seem like a beggar simply because one has children.

PRES. Oho! You’re proud.

SCH. That’s not illegal.

PRES. And that’s why you went to the woman Thomas?

SCH. Yes, monsieur. My husband and I had arranged our expenses

carefully. On the evening of the day we were paid our salary we used

to divide the money into little portions and put them away. So much

for rent, so much for food, so much for clothing. We just managed

to get along by being most careful; and several times we cut down

expenses it didn’t seem possible to cut down. A third child coming

upset everything. We couldn’t have lived. We should all have starved.

Besides, the inspectors and directresses don’t like us to have many

children, especially if we nurse them ourselves. They told me to hide

myself when I was suckling the last one. I only had ten minutes to do

it in, at the recreations at ten o’clock and at two o’clock; and when

my mother brought baby to me I had to shut myself up with him in a dark

closet.

PRES. All that’s irrelevant.

COUN. DEF. No, M. le président, it ought to be known here how the

State, which preaches increase of the population, treats its employés

when they have children.

PRES [_furious_] You have no right to speak. [_To the schoolmistress_]

Have you anything more to say?

SCH. No, M. le président.

PRES. Then sit down. Tupin, stand up.

TUPIN [_a working man, mean and wretched_] After you, Calvon.

PRES. What! _What_ did you say?

TUPIN. I said ‘After you, Calvon.’ Calvon’s your name, isn’t it?

PRES. I warn you I shall not stand any insolence from you.

TUPIN. I say to you ‘After you, Calvon,’ as you say to me ‘Tupin, stand

up.’ If that’s insolence, I didn’t begin it.

PRES. I shall have you turned out of the court. Stand up.

TUPIN [_standing_] There: I’m very glad to. It’ll take the stiffness

out of my legs.

PRES. Your profession?

TUPIN. Electrician.

PRES. You were once. It is a long time since you worked regularly.

TUPIN. I can’t get work.

PRES. Because you look for it in the public house. The police reports

about you are most unfavorable.

TUPIN. I never liked the police: I’m not surprised they don’t like me.

[_Laughter from the audience_].

PRES. Silence! or I shall clear the court. [_To Tupin_] The name of

your wife, Eugénie Tupin, has been found in the papers of the woman

Thomas. Where is the woman Tupin? Stand up. [_To Tupin_] That will do,

sit down. You attempted to conceal her from the police.

TUPIN. I thought they were not good company for her.

PRES [_pretending not to hear and consulting his notes_] You gave

yourself up and declared that you yourself took her to this woman’s

house.

TUPIN. You speak like a book.

PRES. You persistently accused yourself. Did you want to go to prison?

TUPIN. It’s not a bad place. One’s warm, and there’s food at every

meal.

PRES. It is true that prison diet is better than your everyday fare.

TUPIN. Now you’re talking.

PRES [_consulting his notes_] When you were arrested you were both

completely destitute. What remained of your furniture had been sold,

and you were entering upon a state of complete vagabondage. No doubt

you also will accuse society. You are an unruly person. You frequent

Socialist clubs; and when you don’t affect a cynical carelessness in

your language, as you are doing now, you like to repeat the empty

phrases you have picked up from the propagandist pamphlets which are

poisoning the minds of the working classes. But we know all about you;

and if you are a victim, you are the victim of your vices. You drink.

TUPIN. I have taken to it lately. That’s true.

PRES. You confess it. Most extraordinary.

MME. TUPIN. What does that prove?

PRES. Your eldest daughter is on the streets and one of your sons has

been sent to prison for a year for theft. Is that true?

TUPIN. Possibly.

PRES. Not quite so insolent now. I congratulate you. We will proceed.

You took your wife to an abortionist. Why?

TUPIN. Because I considered that bringing seven miserable little devils

into the world was enough.

PRES. If you had continued to be the honest and laborious workman that

you once were you might have had another child, without that child

being necessarily a miserable little devil.

MME. TUPIN. That isn’t true.

TUPIN. No, monsieur. After four it’s impossible.

PRES. I don’t understand you.

TUPIN. What I say is that a workman’s family, however hard they work

and screw, can’t get along when there are five children.

PRES. If that is true there are—and this society you despise may be

proud of it—there are, I say, many charities on the watch, so to speak,

for the destitute; and they make it a point of honor to leave none

without relief.

TUPIN [_indignant_] Oh, and that seems all right to you, does it? You

say it’s a workman’s duty to work and to have a lot of children, and

when he does it, fair and square, and it makes a beggar of him, it

seems to you all right!

PRES. Ah, ha! Here’s the orator of the public house parlor. In the

first place, we have only your assertion that a workman’s family cannot

live when there are five children. But, thank God, there are more than

one or two in that condition who have recourse neither to charity nor

to an abortionist.

MME. TUPIN. That’s not true.

TUPIN. Shall I prove to you that you’re wrong?

PRES. That has nothing to do with the charge against you.

MME. TUPIN. Yes, it has.

TUPIN. I beg your pardon. If I prove it that will explain how I came to

do what I did.

MME. TUPIN. I should think so!

PRES. Very well, but cut it short.

TUPIN. I gave my lawyer the month’s account. Please let him read it to

you.

PRES. Very well.

_The counsel for the defence rises._

COUN. Here it is.

PRES. Stop. You’re not Tupin’s counsel.

COUN. No, M. le président. But my learned friends, with a confidence

which honors me, and for which I thank them, have begged me to take

over the conduct of the case as a whole, reserving to themselves the

right to discuss important matters affecting their several clients.

PRES. Then I give you permission just to read this document. But do not

attempt to address the court. This is not the time. You can read the

paper and that is all. Do you understand?

COUN. I perfectly understand, M. le président. [_He reads_].[B]

[Footnote B: A shorter version of this document, for the theatre, will

be found in a note at the end.]

DAILY EXPENSES.

FOR THE MOTHER AND CHILDREN.

_Breakfast._ f. c.

Milk, 20c., bread, 10c 0 30

_Dinner._

Bread 0 70

Wine 0 20

Vegetables and dripping for soup 0 20

Meat 0 60

A relish for the children 0 25

SUPPER FOR ALL THE FAMILY.

Stew 0 90

Potatoes, etc. 0 20

Wine 0 40

FOR THE HUSBAND.

Tramway return fare 0 30

Tobacco 0 15

Dinner (out) 1 25

—————

TOTAL FOR THE DAY. 5 45

Comes to 1989f. 25c. per annum.

YEARLY EXPENSES.

Rent, 300f.

Dress.—Three skirts at 5f.; three bodices at 3f.; sixteen pairs of

boots for the children at 4f. 50c. the pair; four for the parents at

8f. Two hats at 2f. Underclothes for the mother, 5f.; for the father,

15f.; for the children, 30f. Bedding and linen, 10f. Clothes of the

father, 120f. Total, 312f.

The expenses are therefore 2,600f. a year. Tupin, who was a capable

workman, earned 175f. a month, or 2,100f. a year. There was therefore

an annual deficit of 500f. As I promised, I abstain from comment. [_He

sits down_].

MME. CHEV [_to her neighbor_] There were three sous a day for tobacco

that he might very well have saved.

COUN. Perhaps this document might be formally put in evidence.

PRES. It is quite useless. [_To Tupin_] I am not going to dispute your

figures. I admit them, and I repeat there are charities.

TUPIN. And I repeat that I’m not a beggar.

PRES. You prefer to commit what is almost infanticide. A man who has a

daughter on the streets and a son a thief may accept charity without

degradation.

MME. TUPIN [_outraged_] Oh!

TUPIN [_indignant_] In those days they were not what they are now. If

they fell so low it was because I had too many children and I couldn’t

look after my boy; and because my girl was deserted and starving. But

you must be made of stone to throw that in my teeth.

PRES. And if you took to drinking it’s not your fault either, I suppose?

TUPIN. I want to explain about that. When we began to get short in the

house my wife and I started to quarrel. Every time a child came we

were mad at making it worse for the others. And so—I needn’t make a

long story of it—I ended up in the pub. It’s warm there, and you can’t

hear the children crying nor the mother complaining. And besides, when

you’ve drink in you forget.

MME. TUPIN. It’s the sort of thing that it’s good to forget.

TUPIN. And that’s how we got poorer and poorer. My fault if you like.

PRES. And the last child, what about that?

MME. TUPIN. Oh, the last.

TUPIN. The last? _He_ cost us nothing.

PRES [_carelessly_] Eh?

MME. TUPIN. No.

TUPIN. No, he was a cripple. He was born in starvation, and his mother

was worn out.

PRES. And his father was a drunkard.

TUPIN. Maybe. Anyway that one, the sickly fellow, wanted for nothing.

They took him into the hospital. They wouldn’t let me take him away.

MME. TUPIN. He was a curiosity for the doctors.

TUPIN. And they nursed him and they nursed him and they nursed him.

They didn’t leave him a minute. They made him live in spite of himself.

And they let the other children—the strong ones—go to the bad. With

half the money and the fuss they wasted on the cripple they could have

made fine fellows of all the others.

PRES. And was that the reason you did away with the next?

MME. TUPIN. For all the good he’d have got out of this world he might

thank me for not letting him come into it.

PRES. He should never have been created.

TUPIN. That’s true.

PRES. If everyone was like you the country would soon go to the dogs.

But you don’t trouble yourself much about the country, I expect.

TUPIN. Someone said ‘A man’s country is the place where he’s well off.’

I’m badly off everywhere.

PRES. You are perfectly indifferent to the good of humanity.

TUPIN. Humanity had better come to an end if it can’t get on without a

set of miserable wretches like me.

PRES. The jury thoroughly appreciate your moral sense. You can sit down.

_Evening has come. The ushers bring lamps._

PRES [_to Madame Tupin_] Have you anything more to say?

MME. TUPIN. I have to say that all this is not my fault. My husband and

I worked like beasts; we did without every kind of pleasure to try and

bring up our children. If we had wanted to slave more I declare to you

we couldn’t have done it. And now that we’ve given our lives for them,

the oldest is in hospital ruined and done for because he worked in a

‘dangerous trade’ as they call it!

PRES. Why didn’t you put him into something else?

MME. TUPIN. Because there’s no work anywhere else. They’re full up

everywhere else. There are too many people in the world. My little girl

is a woman now like lots of others in Paris. She had to choose between

that and starving. She chose that. I’m only a poor woman, and I know

what it means to have nothing to eat, so I forgave her. The worst of it

is that sometimes she’s hungry all the same.

TUPIN. And they say God blesses large families!

PRES [_from his notes_] Two others of your children are dead. The two

youngest are out at nurse.

MME. TUPIN. Yes. They were taken away as soon as they were born. All

I know about them is the post-office order I send every month to the

woman who’s bringing them up. Oh, it’s cruel! It’s cruel! It’s cruel!

[_She sits down_].

PRES. We have now only to examine the case of Annette Jarras. Let the

woman Thomas stand up. [_To Madame Thomas_] This was your victim. She

was nineteen, quite young and in perfect health. Now she is in her

grave. What have you to say?

MME. THOMAS [_quietly_] Nothing.

PRES. You don’t excite yourself. Oh, we know you are not easily moved.

MME. THOMAS. If I told you that it was pity made me do it, you wouldn’t

believe me.

PRES. Probably not. But at any rate you might try. Every accused person

has a right to say whatever he can in his own defence: of course under

the control of the president of the court.

MME. THOMAS. It isn’t worth while.

PRES. Oh, yes. Let us hear. The gentlemen of the jury are listening.

MME. THOMAS [_after a sign from her counsel_] A girl came to me one

day; she was a servant. She had been seduced by her master. I refused

to do what she asked me to do: she went and drowned herself. Another I

refused to help was brought up before you here for infanticide. Then

when the others came, I said Yes. I’ve prevented many a suicide and

many a crime.

PRES. So that’s your line of defence. It is in pity, in charity, that

you have acted. The prosecution will answer that you have never failed

to exact payment for your services, and a high payment.

MME. THOMAS. And you? Don’t they pay you for condemning other people?

PRES. Those you condemn to death and execute yourself are all innocent.

MME. THOMAS. You prosecute _me_, but you decorate the surgeons who

trade in sterility.

PRES. Be silent. Sit down. Madame Lucie Brignac. [_Lucie comes forward,

in great emotion_]. Calm yourself, madame, and tell us what you know.

You are called for the defence.

LUCIE. It was I, monsieur, who asked to be heard.

PRES. Speak up, madame, I cannot hear what you say.

LUCIE [_louder_] It was I, monsieur, who asked to be heard. I wanted

to defend the memory of my little one. I fear now I shall not have the

strength. [_She controls herself_]. Annette was seduced by a man who

had promised to marry her. She lived with us. When my husband knew that

my sister was in a certain condition, he wished to send her away. I was

indignant, and I left his house with her and my children. We went to

Bordeaux. We had a few hundred francs, and we thought we could work for

our living. [_She stops_].

PRES. Well?

LUCIE. Our money was soon spent. Annette was giving some music

lessons; they guessed her condition and they sent her away. I did some

sewing.

PRES. And earned some money?

LUCIE. I couldn’t always get work. When I got it, I was paid

sevenpence-halfpenny for twelve hours. I was not a skilled worker. Some

people get a shilling and a halfpenny. We were in despair, thinking of

the child that was coming.

PRES. That was not a reason for leading your sister and her child to

their deaths! [_Lucie is seized with a nervous trembling and does not

answer_]. Answer!

COUN. DEF. Give her a moment to recover, M. le président.

LUCIE [_controlling herself_] I wanted to get her into a hospital, but

they only take them at the end. It seems there are homes one can go to

in Paris, but not in the provinces.

PRES. You could have applied for charity.

LUCIE. Six months residence was necessary. And then, what should we

have done with the child?

PRES. As it was impossible for you to bring it up, your sister could

have taken it to a foundling hospital.

LUCIE. Abandon it—yes, we thought of that. We made inquiries.

COUN. DEF. It is necessary to get a certificate of indigence, and then

make an application to the board of admission. They inquire into the

case and admit or reject. The child may die meanwhile.

LUCIE. And they make a condition that the mother shall not know where

her child is. That she shall never see it or hear of it again. Only

once a month she will be told if it is alive or dead. Nothing more.

PRES. Proceed, madame.

LUCIE. Then I brought my children back to my husband, because we had

nothing left. I went to see the parents of the young man, who is the

cause of everything. They practically turned me out of doors. The

young man is going to be married.

COUN. DEF. May I say a word, M. le président?

PRES. You are sure it is only a word?

COUN. DEF. Yes, M. le président. All the guilty are not in court. I

look in vain for the seducer of this poor girl. He is waiting anxiously

in the provinces to hear the result of this trial, fearing his name may

come out. I have received from him and from his family an imploring

letter, entreating me to spare him and not to mention him by name

during the proceedings. Until now, as a matter of fact his name has not

been mentioned, and we are at the end of the trial. Well, I am going

to make it known at once. I shall have no more pity for the family

and the intended wife of this criminal, than he had for the woman who

is dead, and for the woman whose life he has ruined. If there is no

law in the Code of this country which can reach him, there will be at

least indignation enough in the hearts of all honest people to prevent

Jacques Bernin from enjoying in peace the happiness he has stolen!

[_Prolonged applause_].

PRES [_to Lucie_] Proceed, madame. [_Pause_]. Kindly conclude your

evidence.

LUCIE. I implored my husband to take us back, Annette and me. He

wouldn’t. We came to Paris with a little money he gave me. It was too

soon for them to take Annette into one hospital: in another, where they

would have taken her, there was no room. My husband filed a petition

for divorce.

PRES. Kindly tell us about what concerns the woman Thomas.

LUCIE [_with growing emotion_] Yes, monsieur. Annette was always

reproaching herself with having accepted what she called my sacrifice.

She kept saying she was the cause of all my troubles. [_A silence_].

One day they came to fetch me and I found her dead at this woman’s

house. [_In a burst of sobs, which become hysterical, she cries out_]

My little sister, my poor little sister!

PRES [_kindly, to the usher_] Take her back to her place, or, if

necessary, take her outside and do all you can for her. [_To the

defendants_] Then none of you has any more to say in your defence!

TUPIN [_excited_] Oh, if we said all we’ve got to say we should be here

until to-morrow morning!

MME. TUPIN [_the same_] _That_ we should!

TUPIN [_shouting_] We should never stop!

PRES. I call upon the counsel for the prosecution for his speech.

SCH. But, monsieur, you are not going to condemn me? It’s not possible.

I haven’t said everything.

TUPIN. _We’re_ not the guilty ones.

SCH. I’m afraid of getting a bad name. And we hadn’t the means to bring

up another.

MME. TUPIN [_violently, much excited_] Shut up! As it’s like that—as

that’s what they do to our children—as men have found nothing to change

that—we must do it—the women must do it. We must start the great

strike—_the_ strike—the strike of the mothers.

_Cries in the audience, ‘Yes, yes.’_

PRES. Silence.

MME. TUPIN [_shouting_] Why should we kill ourselves to get wage-slaves

and harlots for other people?

TUPIN. _We’re_ not the guilty ones.

PRES. I did not—

MME. THOMAS. And all the men that seduced the girls I saved—have you

punished _them_?

PRES. Sit down.

TUPIN. The guilty ones are the people that tell us to have more

children when the ones we have are starving.

COUN. DEF. The seducers are the guilty ones; and social hypocrisy.

_During the proceedings, anger, which rapidly becomes fury, has taken

possession of the defendants. They are all on their feet except

the schoolmistress, who goes on sobbing and murmuring to herself

unintelligibly. The president, also standing, strikes his desk with

a paper-knife, trying to impose silence. He shouts, but cannot make

himself heard. The tumult increases until the curtain falls. The

voices of the counsel for the defence and the defendants drown those

of the president and the counsel for the prosecution._

MME. THOMAS. The fine gentlemen that get hold of them and humbug them!

PRES. I will have you taken back to prison.

MME. THOMAS. And the rich young man, and the old satyrs—and the men!

The men! All the men!

COUNSEL FOR THE PROSECUTION. Police, can’t you silence these lunatics?

COUN. DEF. You have no right to insult the defendants.

TUPIN. They’ve been doing nothing else the whole time.

COUN. PROS. Keep this rabble quiet! The defendants must respect the law.

COUN. DEF. And you, sir, must respect justice.

COUN. PROS. You sympathize with their crime. I am outraged by it.

COUN. DEF. They are right. They are not guilty. You must respect—

COUN. PROS. I demand—

COUN. DEF. Our customs are guilty, which denounce the unmarried mother!

AUDIENCE. Bravo! Hear, hear!

COUN. PROS. I demand that the counsel for the defence—

COUN. DEF. Every woman with child should be respected, no matter what

the circumstances are. [_Applause_].

PRES. Maître Verdier, by article forty-three of the regulations—

COUN. DEF. Their crime is not an individual crime, it is a social

crime.

COUN. PROS. It is a crime against nature.

COUN. DEF. It is _not_ a crime against nature. It is a revolt against

nature.

PRES. Police, remove the defendants. [_The police do not understand or

do not hear_]. Maître Verdier, must we employ force? [_Tumult in the

whole court_].

COUN. DEF [_rhetorically_] It _is_ a revolt against nature! And with

all the warmth of a heart melted by pity, with all the indignation

of my outraged reason, I look for that glorious hour of liberation

when some master mind shall discover for us the means of having only

the children we need and desire, release us for ever from the prison

of hypocrisy and absolve us from the profanation of love. That would

indeed be a conquest of nature—savage nature—which pours out life with

culpable profusion, and sees it disappear with indifference. But, until

then—

_The tumult recommences._

PRES. Police, clear the court! Police—police, remove the defendants.

The sitting is suspended. [_The magistrates cover their heads and

rise_].

MME. THOMAS. It’s not I who massacre the innocents! _I’m_ not the

guilty one!

SCH. Mercy, monsieur, mercy!

MME. TUPIN. _She’s_ not the guilty one!

TUPIN. She’s right. She’s _not_!

MME. THOMAS. It’s the men! the men! _all_ the men!

_The magistrates go out by the narrow door reserved for them, the

backs of their red robes disappearing slowly during the last words._

TUPIN’S BUDGET (CONDENSED).

The daily food of the mother and the five children consists of a loaf

of bread, soup made of dripping and vegetables, and a stew. Total

cost, 3f. 75c.

The husband’s expenses are: tramway fare, 30c.; tobacco, 15c.; lunch,

1f. 25c.

General expenses of the family: rent, 300f.; clothing, linen, boots

(sixteen pairs for the children at 4f. 50c. the pair, four for the

parents at 8f.), are again 300f.

Annual total, 2,600f.

The Three Daughters

of M. Dupont

[Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont]

Translated by St. John Hankin

Cast of the original production before the Stage Society at the King’s

Hall, London, on March 12, 13 and 14, 1905.

Mme. Dupont KATE BISHOP

Courthezon LEON M. LION

Caroline ITALIA CONTI

Julie ETHEL IRVING

M. Dupont O. B. CLARENCE

Justine LOIS CRAMPTON

M. Mairaut ARTHUR CHESNEY

Mme. Mairaut AGNES THOMAS

Antonin Mairaut CHARLES V. FRANCE

Lignol LEWIS CASSON

M. Pouchelet G. M. GRAHAM

Mme. Pouchelet DORA BARTON

Françoise FLORENCE ADALE

Angèle GERTRUDE BURNETT

ACT I

_A very undistinguished room in a house in a French country town. The

time is February. There is in the centre of the room a table, with

chairs round it; a fireplace on the left, and window on the right; a

piano; lamps; a bronze statuette of Gutenberg; holland covers on the

furniture. There are doors to right and left and at the back._

_Madame Dupont is discovered alone, darning stockings. After a moment

or two Courthezon comes in, with some papers in his hand._

COURTHEZON. Why, you’re all alone, Madame Dupont?

MME. DUPONT. Yes, M. Courthezon.

COURTHEZON. Your young ladies are listening to the band?

MME. DUPONT. No: Julie has gone to pay a call, and Caroline is at

Benediction. She goes every Sunday.

COURTHEZON. Oh, yes, of course.

MME. DUPONT. On Sunday we never see her, except at déjeûner. The rest

of the day she’s at church. I believe she never misses a service. And

now she is one of the Enfants de Marie. At her age, too!

COURTHEZON. How old is she?

MME. DUPONT. Thirty-three.

COURTHEZON. And still very religious?

MME. DUPONT. Very.

COURTHEZON [_nodding_] Her mother was just the same.

MME. DUPONT. You remember my husband’s first wife?

COURTHEZON. Yes. I came to the printing office two years before she

died. [_Pause_] M. Dupont is at his game at the Café du Commerce, no

doubt? I should be there myself if I could afford it.

MME. DUPONT. You have your savings.

COURTHEZON. Precisely; and I don’t want to lose them. But you are

working, Madame Dupont?

MME. DUPONT. Mending some stockings. One must find something to do.

COURTHEZON. I’ve been hard at it, too, all day.

MME. DUPONT. Still at your invention?

COURTHEZON. Yes. I tell you it’s splendid. I’ve been downstairs to the

printing office to see if there were any orders.

MME. DUPONT. Were there any?

COURTHEZON [_looking through papers in his hand_] Three hundred

visiting cards, a price list, and an announcement.

MME. DUPONT [_stopping her work_] Death? Birth?

COURTHEZON. Neither. A marriage.

MME. DUPONT. Give it me. [_Reads paper which Courthezon gives her_] M.

Jacquemin. M. Jacquemin! And who is this Mlle. Martha Violet whom he is

marrying?

COURTHEZON. One of the Violets of the Rue du Pré.

MME. DUPONT. Oh, yes: of course. [_To Courthezon, who makes as if to

take back the paper_] Leave it with me. I will send it down to you. I

want to show it to Julie. So you are pleased with your invention?

COURTHEZON [_sitting down_] I am delighted with it. Delighted! I’ve

been working at it twenty years! And now it’s finished. What do you

think of that?

_Enter Caroline. She is tall, stringy, not pretty, not attractive,

but not absurd. She has a prayer-book in her hand._

MME. DUPONT [_carelessly, to Courthezon, who has stopped_] Go on. It’s

only Caroline. [_Interested_] And you still won’t tell us what it is?

COURTHEZON. Not yet. [_Rising, bowing to Caroline_] Good day, Mlle.

Caroline.

CAROLINE [_half-returning his bow_] Good day, M. Courthezon.

MME. DUPONT. I can imagine how pleased you are.

COURTHEZON. Of course I am.

CAROLINE. You have finished your invention!

COURTHEZON. Yes. How did you guess?

CAROLINE [_a little confused_] Oh, only—

COURTHEZON. Only?

CAROLINE [_in a lower voice_] Only that I knew it.

COURTHEZON. You knew it?

CAROLINE [_confused_] Yes. But never mind about that.

MME. DUPONT [_to Courthezon_] And now you will become a rich man, eh,

M. Courthezon?

COURTHEZON. Not all at once. I must first find someone who will buy

my invention, or who will advance me money to push it for myself. But

there’s plenty of time to think of all that: and whether I succeed

or not, I am glad to have given twenty years of my life to inventing

something that will make life a little easier for those who will come

after me. And now I am going downstairs to the office to do a little

work. You’ll send down that announcement, won’t you?

MME. DUPONT. I won’t forget.

COURTHEZON. Good evening, Madame Dupont. Good evening, Mlle. Caroline.

CAROLINE & MME. DUPONT. Good evening, M. Courthezon.

_Courthezon goes out._

MME. DUPONT. Why were you so sure he had completed his invention?

CAROLINE [_confused, after a moment’s silence_] You won’t tell anyone,

mother?

MME. DUPONT. No.

CAROLINE. Because I prayed for it.

MME. DUPONT [_not spitefully, but with a slight shrug of the

shoulders_] I see.

_Julie comes in._

JULIE. Here I am, maman [_she kisses her_]. You here, Caro? [_She does

not kiss her_].

MME. DUPONT. Ah, Julie! Sit down, dear, and tell me what you have been

doing and whom you have seen.

[_Her warm greeting to Julie contrasts markedly with the cold

reception she previously gave to Caroline_].

JULIE. I went to see Madame Leseigneur.

MME. DUPONT. I might have guessed that.

JULIE. Why?

MME. DUPONT. You only go to houses where there are children. And as

Madame Leseigneur has six—

JULIE. I wish I were in her place. Only think: André, the youngest, you

know, the one who is only six months old?

MME. DUPONT. Yes.

JULIE. He _recognised_ me. There never _was_ such a baby for taking

notice.

MME. DUPONT. You talk as if you were a mother yourself.

JULIE. Jean laughed till he cried when he saw what I had brought him.

Charles and Pierre were in disgrace because they’d been fighting. But

I got their mother to forgive them, so that was all right. To-morrow I

shall go to Madame Durand to hear how Jacques is going on. I hear he

has the whooping-cough.

MME. DUPONT [_laughing_] You ought to have been a nurse.

JULIE [_seriously_] No, no. I should have died when I had to leave the

first child I had nursed.

MME. DUPONT. Then you should marry.

JULIE. Yes. [_Pause_].

MME. DUPONT [_to Caroline_] Well, Caroline, what are you doing there

with your mouth open?

CAROLINE. I was listening.

MME. DUPONT. Have you finished your painting?

CAROLINE. No. I still have six of the Marie Antoinette figures to do,

and a dozen china Cupids to finish.

JULIE. How funny it is to think of Caro painting Cupids!

CAROLINE. Why?

MME. DUPONT [_to Caroline_] And you have to send all those off by

twelve o’clock to-morrow?

CAROLINE. Yes.

MME. DUPONT. You will never have them ready.

CAROLINE. I shall manage.

MME. DUPONT. You might do a little at them now, before dinner, instead

of sitting there twiddling your fingers.

CAROLINE. I shall get up early to-morrow.

MME. DUPONT. Even if you _do_ get up early—

CAROLINE. I shall begin at six, as soon as it is light.

MME. DUPONT. Still, you might do some work on them now.

CAROLINE. I would rather not.

MME. DUPONT. Because it’s Sunday, I suppose; and one mustn’t work on

Sunday.

CAROLINE. Yes. [_Pause_] Why should _you_ mind, mother, if I—

MME. DUPONT. I? Not the least in the world. Do as you please. You are

old enough to decide for yourself.

JULIE [_who has been reading one of the papers_] Is Courthezon down in

the office? I should like the next part of this.

MME. DUPONT. You know quite well your father doesn’t like you to read

the proofs of the stories he has to print.

JULIE. I have no others. Listen to this: isn’t it too bad to have to

stop there? [_Reads_] ‘Solange was still in Robert’s arms. At this

moment the Count entered, menacing, terrible, his revolver in his

hand.’ I do so want to know what happened next!

CAROLINE. The Count will kill them, of course. It is his right.

JULIE. I wonder.

CAROLINE. According to law.

JULIE. That’s no reason. I want to read over again where Robert comes

in. It’s lovely. And the meeting with Solange in Italy, one evening

in May. Where is it? Ah, here! [_Reads_] ‘Under the deep blue of the

sky, picked out by stars, by the shore of the calm sea that a perfumed

breeze just ruffled, and in which were reflected with the stars above

the many distant lights of Mentone and of Monte Carlo—’

MME. DUPONT [_smiling_] And your father imagines he has cured you of

all such foolishness!

JULIE. I am doing no harm.

MME. DUPONT. No matter. I would rather you didn’t read any more novels.

JULIE. Why? Berthe Paillant reads all the stories that come out, and

she’s younger than I am.

MME. DUPONT. Berthe Paillant is married.

JULIE. There it is! If one is not to remain a child to the end of one’s

days one must marry. I am twenty-four, and I may’nt read the books

which Berthe can read at eighteen.

MME. DUPONT. There’s my thread broken again. I believe you bought it at

Lagnier’s, Caroline.

CAROLINE. Yes.

MME. DUPONT. Why didn’t you go to Laurent’s?

CAROLINE. I thought we ought to deal with those who believe as we do.

MME. DUPONT. If only one could find a good Catholic who sold good wool!

CAROLINE. There isn’t one in the town.

JULIE [_with a sigh_] Heigho! You don’t know of a husband for me, do

you, Caro?

CAROLINE. What sort of one do you want?

JULIE [_seriously_] I am getting to the time of life when a woman

accepts the first man who offers himself. Choose whatever sort you

think best for me [_laughing_]. What would be your ideal? Someone in

business? A captain in the army? Tell me.

CAROLINE. No.

JULIE. Why not?

CAROLINE. If I were to marry, I should choose a worker, a man with a

noble aim, a man who would be ready to sacrifice himself to make life a

little easier for those who will come after him.

MME. DUPONT. Oh, don’t talk like a sentimental novel, Caroline.

CAROLINE. I was not.

MME. DUPONT. Well, I’m sure I’ve read that somewhere. Besides, at your

age one doesn’t speak of those things any longer.

JULIE. Talking of that, you know Henriette Longuet?

MME. DUPONT. Yes.

JULIE. She is going to be married.

MME. DUPONT. Indeed?

JULIE. Yes. [_Thoughtfully_] I’m the last to go.

MME. DUPONT. The last go off best. What a week this is for marriages!

Courthezon brought me an announcement just now which I kept to show

you. Where is it? Ah, here it is. [_Hands it to her_].

JULIE [_after looking at it, sadly_] That finishes it!

MME. DUPONT. What do you mean?

CAROLINE. What is it, Julie?

JULIE. Nothing.

MME. DUPONT. Were you thinking of M. Jacquemin?

JULIE. How do I know? He has never said anything to me, of course, but

I fancied he had noticed me. I didn’t care much about him, but he was

better than nothing. Better than nothing! [_Sighs_] It’s a stupid sort

of world for girls nowadays.

_Dupont comes in._

DUPONT [_brimming over with excitement and importance_] Ah! Here are

the children. Run away, my dears, for a few minutes. I’ll call you when

I want you.

JULIE [_going with Caroline_] Caroline! Do you think it is—?

CAROLINE [_thoughtfully_] It does look like it.

_They go out together._

MME. DUPONT. Well, what is it?

DUPONT [_with an air of importance_] M. and Madame Mairaut will be here

in an hour, at six o’clock.

MME. DUPONT. Yes?

DUPONT [_craftily_] And do you know why they are coming?

MME. DUPONT. No.

DUPONT. To ask for Julie’s hand in marriage. That’s all!

MME. DUPONT. For their son?

DUPONT. Well, my dear, it’s not for the Sultan of Turkey.

MME. DUPONT. M. Mairaut, the banker.

DUPONT. M. Mairaut, head of the Banque de l’Univers, 14 Rue des

Trois-Chapeaux, second floor.

MME. DUPONT. Yes; but—

DUPONT. Now, now, don’t excite yourself. Don’t lose your head. The

thing isn’t done yet. Listen. For the last fortnight, at the Merchants’

Club, Mairaut has been taking me aside and talking about Julie—asking

me this, that, and the other. As you may suppose, I let him run on.

To-day we were talking together about the difficulty of marrying one’s

children. ‘I know something of that,’ said he. ‘So do I,’ I said. Then

he grinned at me and said: ‘Supposing Madame Mairaut and I were to

come in one of these days to discuss the question with you and Madame

Dupont?’ You may imagine my delight. I simply let myself go. But no,

when I say I let myself go, I do myself an injustice. I kept a hand

over myself all the time. ‘One of these days. Next week, perhaps?’ I

said, carelessly, just like that. ‘Why not to-day?’ said he. ‘As you

please,’ said I. ‘Six o’clock?’ ’Six o’clock.’ What do you think of

that?

MME. DUPONT. But M. Mairaut—the son, I mean—Monsieur—what is his

Christian name?

DUPONT. Antonin, Antonin Mairaut.

MME. DUPONT. Antonin, of course. I was wondering. Is M. Antonin Mairaut

quite the husband we should choose for Julie?

DUPONT. I know what you mean. His life isn’t all that it should be.

There’s that woman—

MME. DUPONT. So people say.

DUPONT. But we needn’t bother about that. There’s another matter,

however, that _is_ worth considering—though, of course, you haven’t

thought of it. Women never do think of the really important things.

MME. DUPONT. You mean money? The Mairauts haven’t any. They only keep a

couple of clerks altogether in their bank. They may have to put up the

shutters any day.

DUPONT. Yes: but there’s someone else who may put his shutters up

first. Antonin’s uncle. The old buffer may die. And he has two hundred

thousand francs, and never spends a penny.

MME. DUPONT. True. But—

DUPONT. But. But. There you go. You’re determined never to see anything

that is more than an inch before your nose. I don’t blame you for it.

Women are like that.

MME. DUPONT. But suppose he disinherits Antonin?

DUPONT. You forget I shall be there. I flatter myself I shall know how

to prevent Uncle Maréchal from disinheriting his nephew. Besides, what

is Uncle Maréchal?

MME. DUPONT. Antonin’s uncle.

DUPONT. You don’t understand. I ask you what he _is_. What is his

position, I mean.

MME. DUPONT. He’s head clerk at the Prefecture.

DUPONT. Exactly. And he could get me the contract for all the printing

work at his office. Thirty thousand francs a year! How much profit does

that mean?

MME. DUPONT. Five thousand francs.

DUPONT. Five thousand? Ten thousand! If one is only to make the

ordinary trade profit, what’s the good of Government contracts?

MME. DUPONT. I’m afraid young M. Mairaut’s character—

DUPONT. His character! We know nothing about his character. He has one

virtue which nothing can take away from him: he is his uncle’s nephew.

And his uncle can get me work that will bring in ten thousand francs a

year, besides being as rich as Crœsus.

MME. DUPONT. Still, are you sure that he is the right sort of husband

for Julie?

DUPONT. He is the right sort of husband for Julie, and the right sort

of son-in-law for me.

MME. DUPONT [_dubiously_] Well, you know more of these things than I do.

DUPONT [_looks at his watch_] Ten minutes past five. Now listen to me.

We have very little time, but I feel the ideas surging through my brain

with extraordinary clearness. It’s only in moments of emergency that

I feel myself master of all my faculties, though I flatter myself I’m

not altogether a fool at the worst of times. [_He sits upon a chair,

his hands leaning upon the back of it_]. I will explain everything to

you, so that you may make as few blunders as possible. We must get old

Mairaut to agree that all the money, Julie’s and Antonin’s, shall be

the joint property of them both.

MME. DUPONT. But there will be Julie’s dot.

DUPONT [_pettishly_] If you keep interrupting we shall never be done.

The joint property of them both, on account of Uncle Maréchal’s money.

Do you understand?

MME. DUPONT. Yes.

DUPONT. That’s a blessing. Well, then we shall ask for—

MME. DUPONT. No settlements. I understand.

DUPONT. On the contrary, we shall ask for the strictest settlements on

both sides.

MME. DUPONT. But—

DUPONT. You are out of your depth. Better simply listen without trying

to understand. [_He rises, replaces his chair, and taps her knowingly

on the shoulder_]. In these cases one should never ask for the thing

one wants. One must know how to get the other side to offer it, and be

quite pleased to get it accepted. Well, then, I am giving Julie fifty

thousand francs as her dot.

MME. DUPONT. Fifty thousand! But Julie has only twenty-five thousand.

DUPONT. That is so. I shall give her twenty-five thousand down and

promise the rest for next year.

MME. DUPONT. You can’t mean that. You will never be able to keep such a

promise. [_She rises_].

DUPONT. Who knows? If I get the contract from the Prefecture.

MME. DUPONT. We ought to ask Julie what she thinks of this marriage.

DUPONT. We haven’t much time, then. Still, call her: and take off these

covers [_pointing to the chairs_].

MME. DUPONT [_she goes towards the door on the right; then returns_]

But have you thought—

DUPONT. I have thought of everything.

MME. DUPONT. Of everything? What about Angèle and her story?

DUPONT [_pompously_] Angèle is no longer my daughter.

MME. DUPONT. Still, we shall have to tell them.

DUPONT. Naturally. Since they know it already.

MME. DUPONT. I am nearly sure it was she I met last time I was in Paris.

DUPONT. You were mistaken.

MME. DUPONT. I don’t think so.

DUPONT. In any case, in acting as I did I was doing my duty. I can hold

my head up and fear nothing. Call Julie. She will help you to put the

room tidy. [_Madame Dupont goes out_].

DUPONT [_rubbing his hands_] I think I’ve managed things pretty well

this time! I _think_ so!

_Julie and Madame Dupont come in._

JULIE. Father, is it someone who wants to marry me?

DUPONT. It is. [_To Madame Dupont, pointing to the chairs_] Take

off those covers. [_To Julie_] You know young M. Mairaut—M. Antonin

Mairaut? [_He sits down_]. You have danced together several times.

JULIE. Yes.

DUPONT. What do you think of him?

JULIE. As a husband?

DUPONT. As a husband. Don’t answer in a hurry. Take off that cover from

the chair you are sitting on and give it to your mother.

JULIE [_obeying_] Have his parents formally proposed for him?

MME. DUPONT. No. But if they should do so your father and I wish to

know—

DUPONT [_to Madame Dupont, giving her the last chair cover, which he

has taken off himself_] Take all these away. [_Madame Dupont goes

out_]. The formal offer has not been made, but it will be soon, in less

than an hour.

JULIE. Is that why you are taking all this trouble? [_She points to the

chairs_].

DUPONT. Precisely. We mustn’t appear to be paupers or people without

social position. [_He seizes a bowl in which there are some visiting

cards_]. Very old, these cards. Very yellow. And the names, too, common

rather. I must put that right. [_To his wife, who returns_] Go down

to the printing office and ask Courthezon to give you some printed

specimens of our new visiting cards at three francs—no, three francs

fifty. And then put that Wagner opera on the piano which someone left

to be bound. [_Madame Dupont goes. To Julie_] I have no desire to

influence you, my dear.

JULIE. Still—

DUPONT [_going to the mantelpiece_] Still what? Wait while I light the

lamp [_He strikes a match_].

JULIE. Why, it’s still quite light.

DUPONT. When one receives visitors one doesn’t wait till it is dark

before—You are old enough to know—what the deuce is the matter with

the oil?—old enough to know what you are about. Damn the lamps! When

they are never lighted it is the devil’s own job to make them burn.

Yes, as I was saying, it is for you to weigh the pros and the cons.

Marriage—— There! [_He looks round him_] Is there anything else to be

done to make things look better? What is that over there? That great

stupid Caroline’s hat!

MME. DUPONT [_coming in and bringing visiting cards and a piano score

of an opera_] Here are the cards and the music book.

DUPONT. Thanks. [_He gives Caroline’s hat to Madame Dupont_] Take this

thing away. And these stockings. Hide them somewhere. You don’t want

to appear to do your own darning, confound it! It’s extraordinary you

shouldn’t have thought of that. [_Madame Dupont goes out, returning

in a moment. Dupont continues mechanically to Julie_] It is for you

to weigh the pros and cons. This is better. Vicomte de Liverolles; M.

L’Abbé Candar, Honorary Canon; Ange Nitron, Ex-Municipal Councillor.

That will look well enough. The Wagner score on the piano, open, of

course. That’s right. There’s something else I want, though. Julie,

the box of cigars which M. Gueroult sent me when he was elected to the

Chamber.

JULIE [_bringing a box_] Here it is.

DUPONT. Give it me.

JULIE. You haven’t begun it yet.

DUPONT. Wait. [_He rummages in his pocket and takes out a knife, which

he opens_] We must show them that other people besides deputies smoke

cigars at five sous. [_He opens the box_] Without being proud, one has

one’s dignity to keep up. There! [_He takes a handful of cigars and

gives them to his daughter_] Put those in the drawer so that the box

mayn’t seem to have been opened on purpose for them. [_He arranges the

box on the table_]. A fashion paper? Excellent! And for myself [to

_Mme. Dupont_] Léontine, give me a fresh ribbon of my Order of Christ.

This one is faded. [_To his daughter_] He is twenty-eight. He is good

looking and distinguished. He passed his law examination at Bordeaux.

[_He puts a fresh ribbon in his coat and looks at himself for a

considerable time in the glass_]. In a town where I was not known this

would be as good as the Legion of Honour. [_He turns round_]. Well?

Have you made up your mind?

JULIE. I should like more time to think it over.

DUPONT. You have still a quarter of an hour.

MME. DUPONT. She would like a few days, perhaps.

DUPONT. That’s it. Shilly shally! We are to have the story of that

great stupid Caroline over again, are we? No! Your sister, whom you see

now an old maid, who will never be married, unless her aunt in Calcutta

leaves her some money—your sister, too, had her chance one day. She

hum’d and ha’d; she wanted to think it over. And you see the result.

That’s what thinking it over leads to. Here she is, still on my hands!

MME. DUPONT. You mustn’t say that. She earns her own living.

DUPONT. She earns her own living, perhaps; but she remains on my

hands all the same. By the way, we had better not say anything to the

Mairauts about Caroline’s working for money.

MME. DUPONT. They are sure to know.

DUPONT. Not they. What was I saying? Oh, yes. She remains on my hands

all the same. And one old maid is quite enough in the family. Two would

be intolerable. Remember, my child, you have no dot—at least, none

worth mentioning. And as things go nowadays, when one has no dot, one

mustn’t be too particular.

JULIE. To marry nowadays, then, a girl has to buy her husband?

DUPONT [_shrugs_] Well—

JULIE. And there’s nothing but misery for girls who have no money.

DUPONT. It’s not quite as bad as that. But obviously there is a better

choice for those who have a good fortune.

JULIE [_bitterly_] And the others must be content with damaged goods,

much reduced in price!

DUPONT. There are exceptions, of course. But, as a rule, husbands are

like anything else. If you want a good article, you must be prepared to

pay for it.

MME. DUPONT. And, even so, one is often cheated.

DUPONT. Possibly. But M. Antonin Mairaut is a very eligible young man.

No? What do you want, then, in Heaven’s name? If you are waiting for a

royal prince, say so. Are you waiting for a prince? Answer me. Come,

my child, this is an opportunity you may never see again: a young man,

well brought up, with an uncle who is head clerk at the Prefecture and

can double my profits by putting the contract for printing in my way,

not to speak of other things. And you raise difficulties!

MME. DUPONT. Think, dear. You are four-and-twenty.

DUPONT. And you have had the astonishing good luck to captivate this

young fellow—at a ball, it seems.

JULIE. I believe so. He wanted to kiss me in one of the passages. I had

to put him in his place.

MME. DUPONT. You were quite right.

DUPONT. I don’t say she wasn’t—that is, if she didn’t overdo it. In his

case I’m sure it was only playfulness.

MME. DUPONT. Oh, of course.

JULIE. I only half like him, father.

DUPONT. Well, if you half like him, that’s always something. Plenty of

people marry without even that.

MME. DUPONT. You don’t dislike him, do you, Julie?

JULIE. No.

DUPONT [_triumphantly_] Well, then!

JULIE. That’s hardly enough, is it?

DUPONT. Come, come, my dear, we must talk seriously. As a child you

were full of romantic notions. Thank Heaven, I cured you of that

weakness. You know well enough that unhappy marriages are, more often

than not, love marriages.

JULIE [_unconvinced_] I know, I know. Still, I want to have a husband

who loves me.

DUPONT. But he _does_ love you, doesn’t he, since you’ve only just told

us that he wanted to kiss you at a ball.

JULIE. I want to be something more than my husband’s plaything.

DUPONT. You’ll lead your husband by the nose, never fear.

JULIE. How do you know?

DUPONT. Never you mind. I know it. And now really we have had enough of

this. You think that a whim of yours is to upset all my plans, prevent

me from increasing my printing business and retiring next year, as we

intended, your mother and I. You think we haven’t—I haven’t—worked

enough, I suppose. You don’t wish us to have a little rest before we

die? You think I have not earned that rest, perhaps? Answer me! You

think I have not earned it?

JULIE. Of course you have, father.

DUPONT [_mollified_] Very well, then. Still, I don’t want to make you

uncomfortable. I don’t press you for a definite answer to-day. All I

ask is that you won’t be obstinate, or refuse to let us present Antonin

to you as a possible husband, if his parents make any advances. That is

all. You will, then, talk with him, ask him questions. Naturally, you

must get to know each other.

MME. DUPONT. Think carefully, my child.

DUPONT. Make up your mind whether you wish to follow the example of

that great stupid Caroline.

MME. DUPONT. You are quite old enough to be married. [_A pause_].

DUPONT. Answer. Aren’t you old enough to be married?

JULIE. Quite, father.

DUPONT. Have you any other offers?

MME. DUPONT. Have you any choice?

JULIE. No.

DUPONT. You see!

MME. DUPONT. You see!

DUPONT. Well, then, it’s all settled. [_He looks at his watch_] And

only just in time! M. Mairaut is punctuality itself. It’s five minutes

to six. In five minutes he will be here. [_Julie is silent, gazing

through the open window. The laughter of children is heard outside. To

Madame Dupont, irritably_] What’s she looking out of that window for?

MME. DUPONT. It’s Madame Brichot. She is just going in with her

children.

JULIE [_to herself, with a smile of great sweetness, recalling a word

which she has just caught while dreaming_] Maman!

DUPONT. Well?

JULIE. I will do as you wish.

DUPONT. Ouf! Now go and change your dress.

JULIE. Change my dress?

MME. DUPONT. Of course. You will be supposed to know nothing; but you

must be tidy.

JULIE. What am I to put on?

MME. DUPONT [_reflecting_] Let me see. [_A sudden inspiration_] I know.

Isn’t there a dance at the Gontiers’ to-night?

JULIE. But we said we wouldn’t go.

MME. DUPONT [_rising, briskly_] We are going all the same. Put on your

ball dress.

JULIE. Before dinner? Is he marrying my clothes?

MME DUPONT. No. But you look best in your ball dress. Do as I tell you,

dear.

JULIE. Very well. [_She goes out_].

DUPONT. Are you really going to this ball?

MME. DUPONT. Certainly not.

DUPONT. Well, then?

MME. DUPONT. M. Antonin is coming.

DUPONT [_understanding_] And Julie looks far better when she is—you are

quite right. [_A bell rings_]. There they are! Come into the next room,

quick!

MME. DUPONT. Why?

DUPONT. We must keep them waiting a little. It creates an impression.

[_To the maid, who passes to go to open the door, in an undertone_] Ask

them to wait a moment.

MAID. Yes, monsieur.

DUPONT. Now, then. [_He bustles Madame Dupont out of the room. After a

moment M. and Madame Mairaut enter, followed by the maid. Their faces

wear a genial smile, which freezes as soon as they see that the room is

empty_].

MAIRAUT. They are not here?

MAID. I will tell madame. [_She goes out_].

MME. MAIRAUT. Tell madame! [_To her husband_] They saw us coming.

MAIRAUT. You think so?

MME. MAIRAUT. Of course. Why was that lamp lighted? Not for an empty

room, I imagine! I don’t think much of their furniture. Very poor. Very

poor. [_Lifts up a piece of stuff from the back of an armchair_] This

chair has been re-covered.

MAIRAUT [_at the bowl with the visiting cards_] They know some good

people.

MME. MAIRAUT. Let me see. [_She looks at the bowl_]. Those cards were

put there expressly for us not an hour ago.

MAIRAUT. Oh, come!

MME. MAIRAUT. Look! The top ones are all new. The underneath ones are

quite yellow.

MAIRAUT. Because the underneath ones are older.

MME. MAIRAUT. Because the underneath ones have been left out ever since

New Year’s Day, while these are just printed. We must be careful. Above

all things, don’t _you_ make a fool of yourself.

MAIRAUT. All right.

MME. MAIRAUT. Don’t let them think you’re set on this marriage.

MAIRAUT. I understand.

MME. MAIRAUT. Get them to offer that all moneys shall be held jointly.

MAIRAUT. Yes.

MME. MAIRAUT. And to work this, insist on separate settlements.

MAIRAUT. Yes.

MME. MAIRAUT. For the rest, do as you usually do. Say as little as

possible.

MAIRAUT. But—

MME. MAIRAUT. You know well enough that’s the only way you ever do

succeed with things.

MAIRAUT. But there’s something I want to say to you.

MME. MAIRAUT. Then it’s sure to be something stupid. However, we have

nothing better to do. Go on.

MAIRAUT. It’s what I spoke to you about before. It’s been worrying me

a good deal. If the Duponts give us their daughter, who has probably a

dot of twenty-five thousand francs—

MME. MAIRAUT. Twenty or twentyfive thousand, I expect.

MAIRAUT. Well, if they give her to us, who have nothing but the bank,

it must be because they don’t know that Uncle Maréchal is ruined.

MME. MAIRAUT. Obviously. Nobody knows.

MAIRAUT. It isn’t honest not to tell them.

MME. MAIRAUT. Why?

MAIRAUT. Surely, my dear—

MME. MAIRAUT. If you’re going to tell them that, we may as well be off

at once.

MAIRAUT. You see!

MME. MAIRAUT. I see that we ought to hold our tongues. Oh, yes: we

ought. For if you have scruples about injuring the Duponts, I have

scruples about injuring Uncle Maréchal.

MAIRAUT. What do you mean?

MME. MAIRAUT. We have no right to betray a secret. I’m sorry you

shouldn’t have seen that I am quite as particular as you are; only I

put my duty to my family before my duty to strangers. If I am wrong,

say so.

MAIRAUT. But if they ask us point blank?

MME. MAIRAUT. Then we must consult Uncle Maréchal, since he is the

principal person concerned.

MAIRAUT. In spite of all you say it seems to me—[_He hesitates. A

pause_].

MME. MAIRAUT. Well, my dear, which is it to be? If you want us to go,

let us go. You are the master. I have never forgotten it. Shall we go?

MAIRAUT [_giving in, after a moment of painful indecision_] Now that we

are here, what would the Duponts think of us?

MME. MAIRAUT. And then we must remember that the eldest Dupont girl got

into trouble and is now living a disreputable life in Paris. That will

make them less difficult.

MAIRAUT. Hush!

_Madame Dupont and Dupont enter the room. General greetings. ‘How do

you do, dear madame? How are you? How good of you to call! Sit down,’

etc. All sit. Silence._

MME. MAIRAUT. My dear Madame Dupont, I will come straight to the

point. The object of our visit is this. M. Mairaut and I think we have

observed that mademoiselle, your daughter, has made an impression—how

shall I put it? A certain impression on our son.

MAIRAUT. A certain impression. Yes.

MME. MAIRAUT. Antonin will join us here immediately, but of course we

have said nothing to him about this.

DUPONT. Julie, of course, has not the least idea—

MME. DUPONT. She is dressing. We are going to the ball at the Gontiers’

to-night, and the dear child asked if she might dress before dinner.

DUPONT. Not that she is vain.

MME. DUPONT. Not the least in the world.

DUPONT [_to his wife, in an off-hand tone_] She makes her own dresses,

doesn’t she?

MME. DUPONT. Of course. In this house we don’t know what it is to have

a bill from the dressmaker.

DUPONT. Yet with all her other occupations she’s an excellent musician.

MME. DUPONT. Quite excellent. She has a passion for really good music.

She knows Wagner thoroughly.

MME. MAIRAUT. Wagner! Good heavens!

MME. DUPONT. To talk about, I mean.

MME. MAIRAUT. I know your daughter is charming.

MME. DUPONT. And good, too. You would never believe how responsive that

poor child is to affection!

DUPONT [_to Mairaut, offering the box_] Have a cigar?

MAIRAUT. No, thanks. I never smoke before dinner.

DUPONT. Take one, all the same. You can smoke it afterwards. They are

my usual brand, but pretty fair.

MAIRAUT [_taking one_] Thank you.

MME. MAIRAUT. If Antonin is not married already it is because his

father and I wished him to find a wife who is worthy of him. The

question of money, with us, is of secondary importance.

MME. DUPONT. And with us. I’m so glad we agree about that.

MME. MAIRAUT. Antonin might have made quite a number of good matches.

DUPONT. It is just the same with Julie. In spite of that unfortunate

affair in the family.

MAIRAUT. Yes, we know.

MME. MAIRAUT. Unfortunate affair? We have heard nothing of any

unfortunate affair. What are you saying, my dear?

MAIRAUT [_mumbling confusedly_] I was saying—nothing—I was saying—No, I

wasn’t saying anything.

MME. MAIRAUT [_to Madame Dupont_] Then there has been some unfortunate

affair in your family?

DUPONT. Yes. By my first marriage I had two daughters. One, that great

fool of a Caroline whom you know.

MME. MAIRAUT. Quite well. She remains unmarried, does she not?

DUPONT. She prefers it. That’s the only reason. The other was called

Angèle. When she was seventeen she was guilty of an indiscretion which

it became impossible to hide. I turned her out of my house. [_Quite

sincerely_] I was deeply distressed at having to do it.

MME. DUPONT. For three days he refused to eat anything.

DUPONT. Yes, I was terribly distressed. But I knew my duty as a man of

honor, and I did it.

MME. MAIRAUT. It was noble of you! [_She shakes him warmly by the

hand_].

MAIRAUT. Since you were so fond of her, perhaps it would have been

better to keep her with you.

MME. MAIRAUT. My dear, you are speaking without thinking. [_To Dupont_]

And what has become of her?

DUPONT [_lying fluently_] She’s in India.

MME. DUPONT. In India?

DUPONT [_to Madame Dupont_] Yes, with her aunt, a sister of my first

wife’s. I have had news of her from time to time. [_To Madame Mairaut_]

Indirectly, of course.

MME. MAIRAUT. I repeat, M. Dupont, all this does you honor.

[_Thoughtfully_] Still, some people might feel—However, I don’t think

this discovery need make us abandon our project at once. Not at once.

[_To Mairaut_] What do you think, my dear?

MAIRAUT. I?

MME. MAIRAUT. You think, as I do, that we must take time to consider,

do you not? [_A pause_]. Without any definite promise on either side,

but merely in order to get rid of all money questions, which are most

distasteful to me, will you allow me to ask you one question, M. Dupont?

DUPONT. Certainly, Madame Mairaut.

MME. MAIRAUT. Have you ever considered [_she hesitates_] what you

would give your daughter?

DUPONT. Oh, yes—roughly, you know.

MAIRAUT. Just so.

MME. MAIRAUT. And the sum is—roughly?

DUPONT. Fifty thousand francs.

MME. MAIRAUT. Fifty thousand francs. [_To her husband_] You hear, dear,

M. Dupont will give his daughter only fifty thousand francs.

MAIRAUT. Yes. [_A pause_].

MME. MAIRAUT. In cash, of course.

DUPONT. Twentyfive thousand at once. Twentyfive thousand in six months.

MME. MAIRAUT [_to Mairaut_] You hear?

MAIRAUT. Yes.

MME. MAIRAUT. For practical purposes that is only twentyfive thousand

francs and a promise.

DUPONT [_with dignity_]. Twentyfive thousand francs and my word.

MME. MAIRAUT. Precisely. That is what I said [_looking at her

husband_]. Under these circumstances, we regret very much, but M.

Mairaut must decline. It really is not enough.

DUPONT. How much are you giving M. Antonin?

MME. MAIRAUT. Not a sou! On that point we are quite decided and quite

frank. As soon as he marries his father will take him into partnership,

and his wife’s dot will be the capital which he will put into the

business.

MAIRAUT. That is the exact position.

MME. MAIRAUT. Antonin will have nothing except what may come to him

after our death.

MME. DUPONT. And I am glad to think you are both in excellent health.

MME. MAIRAUT [_modestly_] That is so.

MME. DUPONT [_meditatively_]. Hasn’t your son an uncle, by the way?

MME. MAIRAUT. Yes, madame.

MAIRAUT. Uncle Maréchal.

DUPONT. People say M. Maréchal has a great affection for M. Antonin.

MME. MAIRAUT. Yes.

MAIRAUT. Very great.

DUPONT. He is rich, too, people say.

MME. MAIRAUT. So they say.

MAIRAUT. However, we haven’t taken him into account, have we?

MME. DUPONT. Still, M. Maréchal would naturally leave everything to his

nephew.

MAIRAUT & MME. MAIRAUT [_together_] Oh, certainly. We can promise that.

He will leave him everything he has.

MME. DUPONT. M. Maréchal has considerable influence at the Prefecture,

has he not?

MME. MAIRAUT. No doubt. But all this is really beside the mark. At

twentyfive thousand francs we could not—

DUPONT. I am sorry.

MME. MAIRAUT. We are sorry, too. [_She rises, saying to her husband_]

Come, my dear, we must be taking our leave.

DUPONT. I might, perhaps, go to thirty thousand.

MME. MAIRAUT. I am afraid fifty thousand is the lowest.

DUPONT. Let us split the difference. Thirty thousand and my country

house at St. Laurent.

MME. MAIRAUT. But it is flooded two months out of the twelve.

DUPONT. Flooded! Never.

MME. MAIRAUT [_to her husband_] Well, my dear, what do you think?

MAIRAUT. Antonin is much attached to Mlle. Julie.

MME. MAIRAUT. Ah, yes, if it were not for that! [_Seats herself_] My

poor boy! [_She weeps_].

MME. DUPONT. My poor little Julie! [_She weeps_].

MAIRAUT [_to Dupont_] You must excuse her. After all, it is her son.

DUPONT. My dear sir, I quite understand.

MME. MAIRAUT [_wiping her eyes_] And, of course, there would be the

other twentyfive thousand in six months.

MME. DUPONT. Of course.

MME. MAIRAUT. Have you any views as to settlements?

DUPONT. On that point I have very definite ideas.

MAIRAUT. So have I.

DUPONT. The money on each side must be strictly settled.

MAIRAUT. Strictly settled? [_A silence of astonishment_].

DUPONT. Yes.

MAIRAUT. His and hers?

DUPONT. Certainly. You agree?

MAIRAUT. Oh, yes, I agree, I agree. Unless you preferred—

DUPONT. That all moneys should be held jointly?

MAIRAUT. Perhaps that would be—

DUPONT. Perhaps so. There is something distasteful, I might almost say

sordid, about strict settlements.

MAIRAUT. That’s it. Something sordid.

DUPONT. They imply a certain distrust.

MAIRAUT. Yes, don’t they? Well, that’s agreed, then?

DUPONT. Quite. The moneys to be held jointly. All moneys, that is,

that may come to them in the future. The first twentyfive thousand, of

course, will be settled on Julie. They will form the dot.

MME. MAIRAUT. The second twentyfive thousand, which you will pay over

in six months, to be held jointly.

DUPONT. Yes. We will draw up a little agreement.

MAIRAUT. Quite so.

_Antonin Mairaut comes in. He is a handsome youth of twenty-eight,

very correct in manner. Greetings are exchanged._

MME. MAIRAUT. Antonin. [_To Dupont and Madame Dupont_] You allow me?

MME. DUPONT. By all means.

MME. MAIRAUT [_She draws Antonin aside and says to him in a low voice_]

It’s settled.

ANTONIN. How much?

MME. MAIRAUT. Thirty thousand, the house, and twentyfive thousand in

six months.

ANTONIN. Good.

MME. MAIRAUT. Now you’ve only the girl to deal with.

ANTONIN. Is she romantic or matter of fact? I don’t quite know.

MME. MAIRAUT. Romantic. Raves about Wagner.

ANTONIN. Good heavens!

MME. MAIRAUT. So I said. But once she’s married and has children to

look after—

ANTONIN. Children! Don’t go too fast. Children come pretty expensive

nowadays. Troublesome, too.

MME. MAIRAUT. Never mind. Don’t cross her now. Later on, of course,

you’ll be master.

ANTONIN. I rather think so.

MME. MAIRAUT [_returning to Madame Dupont_] My dear madame—

MME. DUPONT. Yes?

MME. MAIRAUT. He is afraid he may not please Mlle. Julie.

DUPONT. Absurd!

MME. MAIRAUT. The amount of the dot, too—

DUPONT. It is my last word. [_To his wife_] But what is Julie about?

[_He rings_].

MME. DUPONT [_rises_] I will go and find her.

_A maid enters._

DUPONT. Wait! [_To the maid_] Ask Mlle. Julie to come here if she is

ready.

_The maid goes out._

ANTONIN. I must tell you, monsieur and madame, how flattered I am

to find that the preliminaries have been settled between you and my

parents on this important question. I do not know what will be the

issue, but—

MME. DUPONT. It is we, monsieur, who are flattered. But you’ll see

Julie in a moment. Of course she knows nothing.

MME. MAIRAUT. We might leave them to talk a little together, perhaps?

MME. DUPONT. By all means. We are going to the ball at the Gontiers’.

She asked to be allowed—Here she is. [_Julie comes in. Madame Mairaut

advances to meet her_] There is a crease in your dress, dear. [_She

takes her apart, saying to the Mairauts_] Will you excuse me?

JULIE [_in a low tone_] Well?

MME. DUPONT. It rests entirely with you. We are going to leave you to

talk together. Remember, it may be your last chance. Don’t throw it

away.

JULIE. I have thought it over and I don’t intend to do as Caroline did.

So if, after we have had a talk—

MME. DUPONT. You’ll have to manage him a little. He has a great eye for

business. If you could make him think you would be useful in the bank.

JULIE. But I hate figures.

MME. DUPONT. Once married you will do as you please. Tuck in that

lace a bit. It’s a little soiled. [_She tucks in the lace of Julie’s

corsage_]. And remember, between lovers there may be little things

which he considers himself entitled to.

JULIE. I understand. They can see you whispering. Go to them. [_Madame

Dupont goes back to Madame Mairaut_].

MME. MAIRAUT. What did she say?

MME. DUPONT. She has not the least suspicion at present.

MME. MAIRAUT. Let us leave them together. [_Aloud_] My dear M. Dupont,

I have long wished to go over a printing office. May we?

DUPONT [_delighted_] If you will kindly come this way.

MAIRAUT. Thank you.

MME. MAIRAUT. But there really are too many of us. [_Carelessly_] The

children might stay here, don’t you think, madame?

MME. DUPONT. By all means.

_They go out._

ANTONIN [_looking at the music on the piano_] You are fond of Wagner,

mademoiselle.

JULIE. I adore him.

ANTONIN. So do I.

JULIE. What a genius he is.

ANTONIN. Wonderful.

JULIE. For me he is the only composer.

ANTONIN. The greatest, certainly.

JULIE. No: the only one.

ANTONIN. Perhaps so. How nice it is we should have the same tastes in

art! [_Pause_] Er—they have told you nothing, I understand?

JULIE. About what?

ANTONIN. Your parents, I mean. Mine have said nothing either.

JULIE. They have said nothing, of course, but I guessed.

ANTONIN. So did I. Then I may consider myself engaged to you?

JULIE. Oh, not yet. We must know each other better first.

ANTONIN. We have often danced together.

JULIE. Yes. But that’s hardly enough.

ANTONIN. It’s enough for me. Ever since the first time I saw you at the

ball at the Prefecture.

JULIE. No. It was at the band, one Sunday, that your mother first

introduced you to me.

ANTONIN. Was it? I forgot.

JULIE. I should like to know more about you. Will you—will you let me

ask you some questions? It is not usual, perhaps, but—

ANTONIN. Certainly. Pray ask them.

JULIE. Are you fond of children?

ANTONIN. Passionately.

JULIE. Really and truly?

ANTONIN. Really and truly.

JULIE. I am quite crazy about them. For me children mean happiness.

They are the one thing worth living for [_wistfully_]. But I think I

have a higher idea of marriage than most girls. I want to have my mind

satisfied as well as my heart.

ANTONIN. So do I.

JULIE. A marriage that is a mere business partnership seems to me

horrible.

ANTONIN. Horrible! That’s just the word.

JULIE. And tell me, are you very fond of society?

ANTONIN. Not particularly. Are you?

JULIE. No.

ANTONIN. I am delighted to hear it. The fact is I am sick to death of

parties and balls. Still, if it were necessary for business reasons: if

it would help to get business for the bank, you wouldn’t mind?

JULIE. Of course not. What kind of business do you do at your bank?

ANTONIN. Oh, the usual kind.

JULIE. I have often read what is put up on the wall, Current Accounts,

Bourse Quotations.

ANTONIN. Coupons cashed.

JULIE. That must be very interesting.

ANTONIN. Would you take an interest in all that?

JULIE. Of course. When I was little my father used to make me help him

with his books.

ANTONIN. But now?

JULIE. Now, unfortunately, he has a clerk. I am sorry.

ANTONIN. Do you know that you are charming?

JULIE. So you told me once before.

ANTONIN. Yes: at that ball. You had on a dress just like this one. You

are beautiful. Beautiful. [_He seizes her hand_].

JULIE [_a little troubled_] Please.

ANTONIN. Come. We are engaged, as good as married. Give me one kiss.

JULIE. No. No.

ANTONIN. Won’t you?

JULIE [_frightened_] No, I tell you.

ANTONIN. What beautiful arms you have. [_He draws her towards him_].

You remember how I adored you when we were dancing.

JULIE. Let me go.

ANTONIN [_greatly excited, in a low voice_] Don’t move. You are

entrancing. [_He kisses her upon the arm; she pulls it away sharply_].

JULIE. Monsieur!

ANTONIN [_angry_] I beg your pardon, mademoiselle.

_A very long silence._

JULIE [_after looking at him for some time_] I have vexed you?

ANTONIN. Well, when I see that you positively dislike me. [_Julie,

after a short inward struggle, goes to him_].

JULIE [_putting her arm to his lips with a resigned sadness, which she

hides from him_] Antonin.

ANTONIN [_kissing her arm_] Oh, I love you. I love you.

JULIE. Hush. They are coming back.

_The Mairauts and Duponts come in again._

DUPONT. And when I have the contract from the Prefecture I shall double

my business.

MAIRAUT. Excellent. Excellent.

MME. MAIRAUT. We must be going, dear madame. We have stayed far too

long already. Are you coming, Antonin?

ANTONIN [_to Julie, aloud, bowing profoundly_] Mademoiselle. [_In a

low voice_] My beloved Julie. [_To his mother_] She’s charming. I was

charming, too, by the way. Wagner, children, every kind of romantic

idiocy. And she believed me. [_Aloud to Dupont_] M. and Madame Dupont,

my parents will have the honor of calling upon you to-morrow to ask on

my behalf for the hand of Mlle. Julie.

DUPONT. Till to-morrow, then. Till to-morrow. [_To Antonin_] All sorts

of messages to your uncle, if you see him.

ANTONIN. I shall not fail. [_He bows. The Mairauts take their leave_].

DUPONT [_to Julie_] That’s all right, then?

JULIE. Yes. I really do like him. I think I managed him pretty well

too. Wagner. The bank. He thinks I’ve a perfect passion for banking.

DUPONT [_laughing_] Good. You’re my own daughter. Kiss me. And your

father? He managed pretty well, I think. I have arranged that all

moneys except your dot shall be held by you both jointly; so that if

you are divorced, or if you die after Uncle Maréchal, your dot will

come back to us, and half whatever he leaves. I call that a good day’s

work. And at dessert we’ll drink a bottle of the best to the health of

Madame Antonin Mairaut.

MME. DUPONT [_embracing her_] My poor little daughter.

DUPONT. Poor, indeed! She’s a very lucky girl. I wonder where that

great stupid Caroline has got to. [_He calls_] Caroline. She is never

here when one wants her. [_He calls again_] Caroline. She is hard at

work painting Cupids on plates, I bet. [_Caroline appears_] Here she

is. Great news. Your sister is engaged to be married.

CAROLINE. Julie. Is it true?

JULIE. Yes.

CAROLINE. Ah!

DUPONT. Is that all you have to say?

CAROLINE. I am very glad, very glad. [_She bursts into tears_].

DUPONT [_astonished_] What’s wrong with her? Crying! And she’s not

even asked who he is. She’s to marry M. Antonin Mairaut, nephew of M.

Maréchal.

MME. DUPONT. Don’t cry like that, my dear.

JULIE. Caroline.

CAROLINE [_trying to restrain her sobs_] Don’t mind me. It is only

because I love you, dear. Now you at least will be happy.

JULIE [_musing_] Yes.

DUPONT [_to himself_] The moral of all this is that that little affair

of Angèle’s is costing me an extra five thousand francs and my house at

St. Laurent.