Bataille de dames

BATAILLE DE DAMES bears on its title-page the names of two authors, Scribe and Legouvé; and as we can determine the nature of their collaboration from internal evidence alone, it is necessary to examine somewhat the works and characteristics of each.
Scribe's course was now an uninterrupted triumph. During the whole Bourbon and Orleanist period he was first, with no second, in light comedy. Beginning at the humble Théâtre du Vaudeville and the Variétés, he passed in 1820 to the newly founded Gymnase, for which he wrote one hundred and fifty little pieces, of which the most significant are La Demoiselle à marier, La Chanoinesse, Le Colonel, Zoé, ou l'amant prêté, and Le Plus beau jour de ma vie, the last two familiar to us as The Loan of a Lover and The Happiest Day of My Life. Most of these pieces were written in collaboration with various dramatists, of whom the least forgotten are Saintine, Bayard, and Saint-Georges, men of whom it is quite pardonable to be ignorant. It is, therefore, reasonable to infer that the essential dramatic element in them is due to Scribe alone; and indeed one sees that, while all are slight in conception, they are all ingenious and amusing in intrigue.
Le théâtre a payé cet asile champêtre Vous qui passez, merci! Je vous le dois peut-être.
But as he had gained easily he spent liberally, and many stories tell of his ingenious and delicate generosity.
Scribe's popularity has become a tradition, and his works have proved a veritable bonanza to the dramatic magpies of every nation in Europe; but among the French critics of the past generation he has found a very grudging recognition. It was with a tone of aristocratic superiority that Villemain welcomed him to the French Academy with the words: The secret of your dramatic prosperity is that you have happily seized the spirit of your age and produced the kind of comedy to which it best adapts itself, and which most resembles it. In the same tone Lanson says that Scribe offers to the middle class exactly the pleasure and the ideal that it demands. It recognizes itself in his pieces, where nothing taxes the intellect. Dumas fils goes even further, and compares him to the sleight-of-hand performer with his trick-cups and thimble-rings, in whose performance one finds neither an idea nor a reflection, nor an enthusiasm, nor a hope, nor a remorse, nor disgust, nor pleasure. One looked, listened, was puzzled, laughed, wept, passed the evening, was amused. That was much, but one learned nothing at all.