Her first play is the history of a grand passion in two undisciplined yet superior natures—two super-mortals—despite society, and law, and order. Philippe and Hélène are (as Gobineau would say) ‘Children of the King,’ morally and intellectually a head and shoulders above the people. By what process of reflection are they induced to sacrifice a miraculous possibility of happiness, a draught such as they alone might quaff, to rights and duties which they do not acknowledge? Why, being giants, do they submit to the bonds of the pygmies? Are they right, are they wrong in the renunciation? Is there only one right and one wrong? Such are the questions raised by the history of her Affranchis—her Free Souls, thus most ironically named, since, in fact, none of us is free, and we act, not as we would, nor as we should, but as we can.
Philippe Alquier is a philosopher, a great professor, a pioneer of ideas, an idol of the young: in fact, a sort of Bergson, a sort of Barrès—the Barrès of yesterday. He believes neither in duty, nor in the moral law, nor in any Absolute, nor in any certitude; and he discerns, in the floating relativity of things, but one obligation, that of augmenting to its utmost his personality. He is married to a pleasant, pretty wife, whose irritating mediocrity is, so to speak, the hall-mark of her virtue: it is impossible to be more respectable than Marthe. In the early Twentieth Century, at the dissolution of French monasteries, Alquier, the philosophic anarchist, receives under his roof his wife’s sister, Mother-General of the order of Reformed Cistercians, Abbess of Fontevrault.
Under his roof—or rather under her roof, for the Abbess of Fontevrault is co-heiress with her married sister in the properties which the Alquiers inhabit, both in Paris and in the country. But necessity in this case is doubled by no disapprobation: Philippe Alquier naturally believes in the rights of minorities. Although politically of the extreme left, he would in this affair have voted with the extreme right (as did many Dreyfusards some twenty years ago, who opposed the banishment of their political enemies, the Jesuits), and thus, in the opening scene, the author establishes her hero’s refusal to allow the tyranny of the greatest number.
The abbess brings with her a postulate of her order, secularised like herself, but (in the case of the girl) before she had pronounced her vows. Hélène Schlumberger, young, beautiful, intelligent, and rich, is naturally the heroine of the piece. Her mind, the fresher that hitherto it has been restricted to the skyey sphere of theology and ethics, revels in the wide and indiscriminate culture with which Alquier delights to enrich it. Nietzsche, Bergson, Anatole France, she absorbs all without a protest. Naturally, history repeats itself, and Abelard falls in love with Héloïse, and Héloïse still deeper in love with Abelard.
What, in this conjuncture, is the duty of a free soul? Shall Philippe Alquier divorce his faithful, admirable, uninspiring wife? Shall he keep a virtuous young lady as his secret mistress? He makes both these proposals, but he makes them as one who feels how impossible they are. For we act, not in accordance with what we actually think and believe, but as persons still inspired by what we used to think and have long been in the habit of believing: when Alquier proposes a divorce to the girl he has educated in the ideas of Nietzsche, her first instinctive cry is: Et les autres? She is an altruist still, and a Christian, in spite of herself, and acts according to an impetus given years ago, perhaps before her birth.
Hélène in the convent to which, unbelieving, she retires, is happier, probably, than she would have been as Alquier’s concubine (setting society at defiance) or as his wife, Hagar enthroned, having sent out the lawful Sarah into the wilderness. In the convent at least she finds, if not a faith, a rule of life. A discipline and an ideal are things more intimately necessary to her soul, such as the ages have formed it, than the happiest passion, if satisfied in their despite. And Alquier, too, will acquiesce. When he threatens the abbess with political reprisals, with the ruin of her order, she smiles:—
‘Vous ne ferez rien de tout cela, Philippe, et vous me donnerez votre fille à élever.’
In her second play, Le Redoubtable (produced at the Odéon Theatre in January, 1912, and withdrawn by the author after three representations), Mlle Lenéru shows still more forcibly the monstrous, the almost cancerous growth that a too exasperated personality may become in an organised community of mediocrities.
Georges Malte is the most brilliant naval officer of his promotion; all that an individuality can acquire and possess in one generation, he has acquired, he possesses. But nothing else, neither traditions, nor inherited breeding, nor the instincts of a gentleman, nor even fortune; Malte is the son of an Italian pastrycook, and no more French by birth than Napoleon, or Zola, or Gambetta—who, after all, were pretty tolerable Frenchmen. And his soul is devoured with ambition for the refinements he does not inherit; and his mind is consumed by the desire to be first, by that amor dominandi which is, in certain natures, the strongest passion of all.
And his heart is wholly occupied by the mistress he adores, who is, most simply and most naturally, all that he can never be: the child of a ruling race. Laurence Villaret is the daughter of one admiral, the wife of another. For six years she and her lover have belonged to each other in secret, and at length the time comes when Malte (who in his love of supremacy has affected the rich man) feels his creditors close upon him and disgrace near at hand. Money he must have or farewell to his career, good-bye to the love of his life.