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BATAILLE DE DAMES

PAR SCRIBE ET LEGOUVÉ

WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES, AND VOCABULARY

BY BENJ. W. WELLS, PH.D. (HARV.) FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF MODERNLANGUAGES,UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH.

INTRODUCTION

"BATAILLE DE DAMES" bears on its title-page the names of twoauthors,Scribe and Legouvé; and as we can determine the nature of theircollaboration from internal evidence alone, it is necessary to examinesomewhat the works and characteristics of each.

Eugène Scribe^[A]was the most prolific,probably the most popular, andproportionally the most wealthy, playwright of French literary history.He was born on Christmas Eve, 1791, and died on the 20th of February,1861. He lost both parents in early years, and for a time pretended tostudy law in Paris; but before he was twenty his dramatic vocation haddeclared itself unmistakably, though his first comedy, "Les Dervis"(1811), and indeed the dozen that followed it, were unmistakablefailures. His mind seemed to flow naturally into all the lighter formsof drama, and at last, after five years, success crowned hisperseverance in "L'Auberge;" and "Une Nuit de la garde nationale" gavehim notoriety and even a sort of fame, just as the Restorationinaugurated that period of social lassitude so favorable to therecognition of his peculiar talent; for duringhis whole career he wasan amuser far more than an instructor. He took the vaudeville^[B], asithad been developed during the eighteenth century by Le Sage, Regnard,Piron, Marmontel, and even J.-J. Rousseau, and gave it a body and aliving interest, till it became the comédie-vaudeville,and then,discarding even the little snatches of song, the couplets thatstillmarked its origin, spread its butterfly wings as the modern comedy ofintrigue.

Scribe's course was now an uninterrupted triumph. During the wholeBourbon and Orleanist period he was first, with no second, in lightcomedy. Beginning at the humble Théâtre du Vaudeville andthe Variétés,he passed in 1820 to the newly founded Gymnase, for which he wrote onehundred and fifty little pieces, of which the most significant are "LaDemoiselle à marier," "La Chanoinesse," "Le Colonel,""Zoé, ou l'amantprêté," and "Le Plus beau jour de ma vie," the last twofamiliar to usas "The Loan of a Lover" and "The Happiest Day of My Life." Most ofthese pieces were written in collaboration with various dramatists, ofwhom the least forgotten are Saintine, Bayard, and Saint-Georges, menofwhom it is quite pardonable to be ignorant. It is, therefore,reasonableto infer that the essential dramatic element in them is due to Scribealone; and indeed one sees that, while all are slight in conception,they are all ingenious and amusing in intrigue.

In his more ambitious comedies Scribe at first preferred to workalone,and here, too, he learned success by failure.^[C] The newconditions,social and political, that followed the Revolution of 1830, helped himalso; for new liberties admitted, and the new bourgeois plutocracyinvited, the good-humored persiflage in which he was an easy master. Onthe other hand, he was hardly touched by the accompanying Romanticmovement in literature that was then convulsing the theatre-goingpublicwith "Hernani" and "Antony." He cared much less for the critics thanforthe box-office, and now transferred his work almost wholly to thenational Théâtre Français. Here were producedduring the eighteen yearsthat separate "Bertrand et Raton" from "Bataille de dames" (1833-1851)almost all his pieces that still hold the stage, notable among them "LaCamaraderie," the most popular of his political comedies, "UneChaîne,""Le Verre d'eau," "Adrienne Lecouvreur," and "Les Contes de la reine deNavarre." The last two, the present comedy, and the somewhat later"Doigts de fée" (1858), were written in collaboration with